Research in Motion (RIM) was a homegrown Canadian success story in how it invented the “smartphone” took over the market, and was destroyed by the iPhone because they couldn’t adapt for the touch screen market.
To be fair, the iPhone kind of caught everyone by surprise. There were touchscreen devices before, but they pretty well sucked. The iPhone managed to not suck by virtue of using a completely different touchscreen technology, that nobody else was using (at least, almost nobody: I’m sure someone will come up with a niche product that sold dozen or hundreds of units before the iPhone was released).
Has anybody mentioned the possibility of paid product placement? A quick Google search seems to indicate that Blackberry was somewhat renowned for that sort of thing.
Yup, mentioned once or twice upthread.
For sure but it was RIM’s arrogance that really did them in. They held a news conference saying that the claims in Job’s presentation were bullshit and getting a processor and battery to do those things in the iPhone package were impossible. It was a joy to watch them crash and burn.
They bought it from FingerWorks when it was still in development, with its only application a touch screen keyboard of some kind. Apple paid…$30 million. Kinda crazy now.
And it didn’t require a helmet.
