Jim Balsillie is one of the former presidents of the Canadian company Blackberry, former RIM, is speaking in a recent interview about the time spent at the head of the smartphone manufacturer. Balsillie left the position of CEO of Blackberry three and a half years ago, and the other day he admitted that the iPhone "killed" Blackberry in the years before its launch on the market, those within the former RIM failing to understand exactly why this happened.
The former CEO claims that even before leaving the company in 2012, he knew that Blackberry could not compete with Apple on the smartphone market, and this because of the failed attempts to launch touchscreen smartphones on the market.
The Blackberry Storm was one of the former RIM's first attempts to bring touchscreen smartphones to market, but the 100% return rate convinced the former CEO that his company had no chance of competing with Apple .
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 claims that the disastrous launch of the BlackBerry Storm was due to the fact that RIM tried too quickly to bring a smartphone to the market to compete with the iPhone, and the result was a terminal that generated only negative reactions.
Moreover, Balsillie believes that if Blackberry had launched the BBM service, Blackberry Messenger on iOS and Android a few years ago, at the moment it would have competed much more effectively with iMessage or WhatsApp Messenger and would have generated more money .
"With Storm we tried to do too much. It was a touch display, it was a clickable display, it had new applications, and it was all done in an incredibly short period of time and it blew up on us," Balsillie said. "That was the time I knew we couldn't compete on high end hardware."
None of what Balsillie said is unknown to the world at large, with many saying that Blackberry should have viewed the iPhone as a strong competitor and not as a device that would not be successful.
