On January 4, 2022 (the day before the start of CES last year) John Chen wrote a the eulogy/blog post for the Blackberry phone entitled "BlackBerry’s Transformation Journey and Our Smartphone Heritage". In the post, John Chen marked the official end of the Blackberry that made the worlds first smart phone. 

As of today, BlackBerry has decommissioned the infrastructure and services used by our legacy software and phone operating systems which are over 20 years old now.* - John Chen 

He went on to write: The End is Just the Beginning...

today marks the beginning of a new era. The independence, mobility, security, and privacy that so many of us came to associate with those ground-breaking BlackBerry devices remains alive and strong, as does the spirit of invention and innovation that got us here....We securely connect more than 500 million...devices.** 

It took Blackberry two weeks to write their 2022 CES blog post (January 19, 2022).

On January 5, 2023, Mark Wilson, Blackberry's Chief Marketing Officer and longtime colleague of John Chen, wrote another blog post entitled "CES 2023: Writing Blackberry's Next Chapter". In the post, Mark highlights the important announcements they made in regards to IVY and QNX using language that clearly connects John Chen's message from CES 2022 to this year's event. This is no accident but rather a marketing strategy coming into focus.

For some time now, Blackberry has been engaged with a PR company since at least 2019 to rebrand the company from the mobile handset maker into the IOT/Cybersecurity company that we know today. The PR Team and Blackberry have been engaged to "Reposition BlackBerry as an innovative cybersecurity leader while reinforcing the company’s legacy of trust and security has been a success with major lift in cybersecurity and feature stories in outlets such as CNBC, Business Insider, Forbes and more."

Publications ran stories about the demise of Blackberry since 2019

Last year's signal shift from "Dead Hand Set Maker" to "Provider of Intelligent Security. Everywhere".

The November Tone Shift and POC delivery:

  • In November, Blackberry announced four separate investor calls with the IOT team. A number of folks, not just me, noted a marked change in tone from John Wall, SVP in charge of QNX, and Mattias Erickson, president of IOT Business Unit. it was in these investor calls that Mattias Erickson and John Wall clarified a number of misunderstandings about QNX, threw some soft shade at Tesla, and generally came across as highly confident about the progress they'd been making with QNX and IVY. 

  • The tone shift here during the investor calls makes sense when you consider they fell between Bosch Connected World, where Adam Selipsky (AWS CEO) gave verbal support for IVY, and AWS: Re:Invent where IVY was in major public view. 

  • CNBC Documentary featuring CEO John Chen, CTO Charles Eagan, and Senior VP of IVY Platform Development Sarah Tatsis. 

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"The margin's going up and one of these days the switch will flip...We now have the lion's share of embedded software in most of the cars. This is really a result of the strategy shift in 2016..." - John Chen 

CES 2023 and the Blackberry Sequel:

  • At CES, Blackberry and Motortrend held the first annual Software Defined Vehicle Awards show bringing together almost all the heavy hitters in the automotive space at one location. The Coding the Car documentary, which was released in September at the Detroit Auto Show, brought together a huge number of competitors to sit down to support this documentary. We learned at CES that this is, in part, because they anticipate they're going to need embedded software developers that know QNX... it's a recruiting tool. Mattias Erickson felt so comfortable at the event that he said he was still recovering from his Blackberry margarita at the investor conference the next day. 

  • More confidence at the CES investor call. Blackberry brought the three leaders of their IOT business unit (Mattias Erickson, Vito G, and John Wall) to discuss the Blackberry IOT business unit. They were more confident and were able to provide more details with a design win under their belts. 

  • Full court press with PR appearances and CES promotional video spots from Compredict, Sarah Tatsis, Charles Eagan, Vito G, and others to highlight Blackberry's offerings. 

  • Yesterday, Blackberry followed up CES with two blog posts: 

No More Excuses. Time to execute.

Now that Blackberry IVY has been released, there are no more excuses. It's all about execution. As John Chen in this interview on CNBC, "I believe we should first operate efficiently, generate the growth, generate the profits." 

It's time to execute. They know it. Based on the noted shift in tone, additional resources put into the rebrand and courting investors, it seems they think they've turned the corner. 

Only time will show whether or not that's right. Good luck