Research in Motion thought the Blackberry keyboard was their killer feature for business professionals. They were wrong. The iPhone killed Blackberry, not Android.
The 3rd hand story I heard ~2011 from a former RIM executive who was there at the time of Steve Job's demo of the iPhone was that Mike Lazaridis' (co-founder of RIM) reaction to seeing the demo: "It's impossible! The whole thing would have to be a battery!"
He's right, it is impossible for the iPhone and clones to match the blackberry's batter life. It turns out any (certainly not all but few enough to keep blackberry in the market) prefer 60FPS scrolling to having the battery last a week.
In terms of marketshare, Blackberry's began to decline in late 2010, during the meteoric rise of Android. For context, Android eclipsed iOS just 6 months later.
But that's also my point - Blackberry killed Blackberry, not iOS or Android. Should Blackberry have been protected from it's competition?
I tend to think it was Blackberry killed Blackberry, not Android or iPhone. Not willing to change and adapt is the recipe for disaster in tech industry. I am not aware of any other industry that moves as fast and at such scale where the whole industry shift.
RIM definitely killed RIM. The sad result of decades of computer/phone market reports using "market share" leads to people misunderstanding "installed base". As the iPhone and Android took off BlackBerry's market share dropped. As in their share of the total smartphone market sales per quarter dropped. Their unit sales (at first) didn't drop much. The installed base of Blackberries also didn't drop (at first).
Android and iPhone initially ate into the unit sales of feature phones. RIM had pathetic consumer offerings. I replaced a Pearl (8100) with the first iPhone with iOS 1.0. For all the issues that combination had it was a far far better phone than my BlackBerry.
RIM didn't understand the consumer phone market at all, and frankly neither did other smartphone vendors outside Apple and Google. RIM assumed their Enterprise moat (Exchange integration, BES, etc) and a fucking hardware keyboard was enough to halt R&D and just sit on their hands. Meanwhile Apple and Google added Exchange support to their existing (ok but not great) POP/IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV support, good app stores for third party software, and maintained their vastly superior web browsing capabilities. Their software keyboards also improved significantly with just better keypress accuracy and better predictive type.
So Apple and Google killed feature phones and then got the features people wanted/needed for Enterprise sales. They were already good enough for a majority of "business" uses since a lot of SMB users of Palms, WinMo, and BlackBerries used zero "Enterprise" features. They needed e-mail and SMS which feature phones didn't support and iPhone and Android had from the outset.
So Apple and Google crossed RIM's moat and RIM had nothing to offer as competition. Everything about BlackBerries was firmly fixed in 2005. This was 2010/11 and iPhones and Androids were the state of the art. Instead of trying to meaningfully compete RIM doubled down on the 2005 phones.
No one should feel any pity for them. Their management seemed trapped in some sort of "we'll just MBA our way out of this" fantasy land.
I remember back in the day, I saw what android was about to do to the market, the writing was on the wall for palm and blackberry. My only thought was that it would be nice if blackberry rebased itself as a business+security focused flavor of Android devices. Sad to say, I've almost never seen a blackberry since.
