For someone that grew up and had a pretty strong Hitchcock phase it is strange that I will, on occasion, enjoy a movie about people talking. Maybe it isn’t that unusual and maybe I am misinterpreting the Hitchcock quote. Either way I watched this independent Canadian film about the Blackberry the other day.
My first thought when I saw it was why and then I watched a clip from it and it looked interesting. It was like The Big Short but about a failed cell phone company. The interesting thing about it and about other movies like it like The Big Short, Margin Call, Glengarry Glen Ross is they are movies about people talking. That is the action. Hitchcock’s criticism was more directed at movies that had to explain themselves and not the overall dislike of dialogue driven pictures but still.
The one big takeaway I got out of the movie is it depicted the introduction of the iPhone to be the immediate end of Blackberry and I remember them limping along for several years afterwards. The touchscreen keyboard and all in one device was too much to recover from and new competitors like Samsung really did them in.
One other takeaways was they made it sound like Apple’s big introduction to the market was the idea of data plans, and I distinctly recall being sold data before the iPhone debuted. I’ve never been a big iPhone person and I remember having a Blackberry and finding it useful, but I also remember switching to droid shortly after it came out.
It is weird to watch a movie about something you lived through and not in the same way as watching something like The Big Short. That felt more distance. This was a movie about the rise and fall of a company whose product lived in my pocket. It is also interesting to think about and remember there was more competition in that space in those days. It wasn’t just Samsung, Apple, and Google a distant third. There was Motorola, Blackberry, LG, Apple, Samsung, and a bunch of others.
The biggest takeaway from that movie as a business owner is don’t forget who you are. Blackberry tried to compete with Apple instead of sticking to their position as the business man’s cell phone. If they had stayed in that lane who knows what would have happened.
David Huzzard Writes 