Balsillie said in his first public remarks since leaving the company in 2012 that he knew BlackBerry couldn’t compete after the iPhone’s introduction in 2007 and after BlackBerry’s buggy touchscreen device called the Storm had a “100 percent return rate.”
Balsillie also described RIM’s disastrous launch of the BlackBerry Storm as a rushed response to bring a touchscreen smartphone to market following Apple’s iPhone.
In his comments, Balsillie said at the time he believed that RIM have brought its once-popular BlackBerry Messenger service to iOS and Android as the company’s revenue was largely from its services and not hardware.
RIM rebranded the company as BlackBerry and did bring its BBM messaging app to both iOS and Android nearly two years after Balsillie’s departure. The service, however, still hasn’t been a massive splash with tough competition from Apple’s iMessage, Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp, and Google’s Hangouts service, and BlackBerry remains as a smartphone and services niche and not the market leader it once was.
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