Research In Motion co-founder admits in an interview: iPhone sank BlackBerry

Three years after leaving the company he co-founded, Jim Balsillie at 2012 co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIM) this week spoke a little about the sunk of BlackBerry and admitted that the iPhone was the main culprit of this.

iPhone 3G and BlackBerry StormiPhone 3G and BlackBerry Storm

According to him, after the launch of the first iPhone in 2007, BlackBerry ran as fast as it could to launch the Storm and what happened was “a 100 percent return rate”. The product was problematic in almost every way, starting with its own touchscreen.

With Storm, we try to do too much. It had a touch screen, a clickable screen, new applications and all this was done in a very short time, which hurt us. It was the one we learned that we were unable to compete on top-of-the-line hardware.

Another reluctance that hurt the company, says Balsillie, was the non-opening of BBM to other platforms. That only happened long after he left BlackBerry, but it was evidently too late.

In 2009, BlackBerry was Canada's most valuable company with an estimated value of $ 140 billion. Today, it barely exceeds $ 5 billion.

(via Fortune)