A swipe and it’s gone

The ferocious pace of tech lifespans is shown by Blackberry moving away from the handset

Blackberry is shifting its focus away from the handsets that made it famous. Simon Dawson / Bloomberg

Blackberry’s announcement that it will shift its focus away from making handsets just goes to show the ferociously accelerated lifespan of the tech world. In little over a decade, Blackberry’s use of a tiny qwerty keyboard on a mobile phone went from being a groundbreaking idea to ubiquitous adoption – leading to the term “crackberry” to describe those who became addicted to their use – through to being yesterday’s technology.

This phenomenon will be familiar to those who once owned other noughties tech mainstays, such as Ericsson and Nokia, that now barely exist on the margins. We ought to acknowledge the processes of creative destruction that caused these brands to fall by the wayside. Would we really still want to be fiddling with the Blackberry’s tiny keyboard instead of swiping and scrolling on an iPhone or on a Google Android handset? That is it in a nutshell – you innovate or die. Would Apple even be here at all if it decided to continue just being a computer manufacturer?