Apple vs. BlackBerry: People Don’t Buy Features, They Buy Feelings
Image created with Midjourney.
How strongly should a CEO fight for their vision for a product? We laud those who persist despite naysayers, and yet the uncomfortable truth is that sometimes the naysayers are right. I can illustrate the difference between prescient commitment to vision, and toxic commitment to vision in one story about two competing smartphone companies.
The rise of BlackBerry
In 2007, BlackBerry was on a roll. Co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie led a company which had cornered over half of the nascent global smartphone market. They had rocketed to the top by appealing to corporate executives who wanted to be seen as technology-forward, but needed secure email and a full keyboard. By creating server software that could push messages securely to Microsoft Exchange, they became the only choice for secure corporate email, and therefore, the only choice for execs in major companies.
As leaders, Lazaridis and Balsillie did some smart things. They appealed to those seeking the rush of Boiler Room-style busyness-as-business culture. There was product placement in Entourage and Suits. This was a time when you could go to a bar at 10pm on a Thursday and see 20-something guys intentionally still in suits, not because they had to be, but because they were trying to evoke that “I’m an important businessman” vibe. The BlackBerry wasn’t just functional, it was aspirational. In business, in 2007, you really weren’t anyone if you didn’t have a BlackBerry. It made users feel seen, but in a validating way—as if the product saw them as the most important version of themselves. As I’ve covered before, this is the first step to driving user behavior.
They even did an early version of the iPhone blue vs. green texts and reinforced the exclusivity by releasing BlackBerry Messenger (only available between BB users, naturally), which introduced the “typing dots”—I like to argue this was the skier going down the side of the mountain that launched the avalanche of dopamine culture in tech. (1)
Competition enters the picture
But a new threat was lurking on the horizon, though Lazaridis and Balsille couldn’t quite see it. By 2007, Steve Jobs’ comeback at Apple was in full, glorious swing. iTunes had just sold its one billionth song (2) (a Coldplay album sold to a Michigander who got a free iMac, 10 ipods and ten grand to spend in the Apple Store along with a Juilliard scholarship in his name for his trouble), bringing the Napster/LimeWire era to an unceremonious end.
But the success didn’t stop there. The iPod was an unquestioned success, boasting 68% market share in 2006 (3). This piqued Jobs’ interest in handheld devices. The market had shown an enormous appetite, but what was the next frontier? Phones. As Jobs said, “We are all born with the ultimate pointing device—our fingers—and iPhone uses them to create the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse.” (4) (5)
In 2007, the first iPhone was released. It was everything the BlackBerry wasn’t: sleek, aesthetic, and sort of beautiful, in a George-Lucas-does-futurism sort of way. Gone were the rows of tiny buttons, replaced by an onscreen keyboard and a single home button. Perhaps not surprising, given that Jobs was famously obsessed with great design, but what may be more surprising is the fact that it resonated. People loved the iPhone, despite its flaws (by all accounts, it barely ran up until weeks before release, and even with the bugs worked out it could be a little befuddling). People didn’t care about its shortcomings. The iPhone gave early technophiles something they’d never had in a product before: style, and the feeling that for a mere $499, they could be stylish too.
The 2007 BlackBerry vs. 2007 iPhone (as drawn by ChatGPT)
What it created was a feeling - of belonging, of importance, of being cool. And people couldn’t get enough. For the first time in a long time, there was a new rock star in town. Not only did people like Apple’s products, they gravitated toward the ethos. And no one was more central to that than the visionary at the top, Steve Jobs. People didn’t just want to buy his products—they wanted to be like him.
But Balsillie and Lazaridis weren’t worried. They couldn’t yet feel the ground shifting under their feet. Balsillie even famously said on an 2007 investor call “I’ve said before [Apple] did us a great favor because they drove attention to the converged appliance space. The attention to it has quite frankly been overwhelmingly positive for our business.” (6)
The positivity was not to last. The dot-com bust of 2002 was over, and people were thinking about technology in a fresh way. Startup culture was taking root. It was no longer aspirational to be at the bar at 10pm in your sportcoat checking your BlackBerry—you wanted to be in a coffee shop in jeans and a hoodie with an iPhone in your hand. This mentality was only exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis.
Despite Balsillie’s optimism, BlackBerry’s fall was swift. U.S. growth all but halted. The international market temporarily kept BlackBerry afloat, but by 2011, BlackBerry was facing massive layoffs and both Lazaridis and Balsillie resigned in 2012. In 2016, BlackBerry stopped manufacturing phones entirely.
Why vision saved Apple and sank BlackBerry
Both companies were led by visionaries who had a strong commitment to their point of view. Both companies faced shifting cultural dynamics and technological capabilities. What made one thrive and one fade away?
An understanding of connection points with the user and how to use them long-term. Let’s review our framework for product success.
Framework for product success
BlackBerry thrived when it found a way to make the user feel seen (‘You’re an important business person’), and built trust with the basics (secure email).
But it failed to continue to introduce new pathways or adapt the initial connection point as consumer attitudes shifted. You cannot remain aspirational by staying in one place. Apple, by contrast, built upon each success, always pushing the boundaries of what had happened before. They didn’t create one vision and keep it – they created a vision and stuck with the spirit of that vision (aesthetics and cool factor) but kept pressing for more groundbreaking implementations. BlackBerry, by contrast, made the vision something too tactical: secure email and a full keyboard. That had nowhere to grow when it was no longer splashy.
If you’re a Green Shirt visionary, you may be wondering how you can emulate Steve Jobs instead of Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. It’s not commitment to vision alone that made Jobs successful. It was creating a vision big enough and high level enough that it had room to grow – and that meant focusing on the feeling and then maintaining the commitment to it vs. the commitment to the specific first-round feature decisions that had been successful once.
The problem with feature-focused visions
If you center your vision on a feature set, as BlackBerry did, there’s nowhere to go. You might luck into an emotional connection once, and convince yourself that you know what people want, but you won’t be able to sustain it.
You can feel this in a roadmap too. A roadmap that fixates on a feature set is haphazard, lacking in cohesion, always throwing in one more feature hoping to land something.
If you center your vision on a feeling, as Steve Jobs and Apple did, you have room to flex and grow as your audience evolves and cultural winds shift. A roadmap focused on the feeling has an overall point of view that your audience can identify with and say “Yes, me too! I align with this company.” This builds brand loyalty.
It’s the difference between a feature set that feels like it was created by the 14 year-old who’s really enamored with what computers can do, vs. one created by a visionary with a point of view on how technology can change the world.
How do you distill that feature you’re really excited about into a feeling that can power a long-term vision? That’s a big topic we spend a lot of time on with our clients, but the short version is: keep digging at the impact of that feature. If you reach beyond the tactical advantages and think about how your user’s story is different after working with your product—that’s the feeling. That can look like: they’re more confident in their understanding of their insurance, more hopeful for their financial future, more engaged with their health, fitter, better hydrated, more financially stable, etc.
That’s the big vision that will see you through the shifts in roadmap and external factors—just like it did for the iPhone, which is still sleek, aesthetic, and a little aspirational, 18 years later.
Notes:
No one in 2009 was prepared for the sheer intensity of anxiety those three BlackBerry Messenger dots could unleash: staring at a phone screen, watching those typing dots show up and then suddenly disappear. The most diabolical was when the dots would go on for a long time and then cease without the person on the other end sending a message. Pure torture, and we all collectively ate it up.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2006/02/23iTunes-Music-Store-Downloads-Top-One-Billion-Songs/
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/01/09Apple-Reinvents-the-Phone-with-iPhone/
The touchscreen actually wasn’t Steve Jobs’ original idea. Many others had pioneered touchscreen concepts first, and Apple’s specific implementation grew from a company called FingerWorks, which was founded by Wayne Westerman and John Elias. Wayne Westerman, who developed carpal tunnel syndrome while working on his doctorate, was motivated to invent a low-impact, multi-touch input device to help people with hand disabilities—including himself—interact with computers more easily. Apple acquired FingerWorks in 2005.
https://www.businessinsider.com/rim-ceo-quotes-2011-9