The Canary in RIM’s Coal Mine Is Gasping for Air

I’ve been meaning to write about this since the federal election campaign ended, but Apple’s recent announcement of iOS 5, and especially iMessage, makes this an especially good time to finally get it out.

What not a lot of people realize, even people with an interest in technology, is that before Blackberry took the business world by storm, even before Barack Obama became RIM’s most famous customer, there was one group in particular that saw the advantages of the devices from very early on and to whom RIM owes a lot of its initial success: Canadian political staffers. More specifically, the campaign team that got Paul Martin elected as Prime Minister.

In 2002, Martin’s campaign was in full swing and a large group of dedicated staffers had built a network of campaign workers and volunteers across Canada.  Mr. Martin had been “resigned” from Cabinet and had plenty of free time to criss-cross the country and campaign for the party leadership in earnest¹.  In these heady days before iPads and 3G data sticks, co-ordinating between campaign workers at the head office, the people traveling with Mr. Martin, and the disparate staffers across the country was often a challenge.  It just so happened, however, that only a few hours down the highway from the campaign headquarters, the people at Research in Motion’s campus in Waterloo were preparing to release a device that could make many of those challenges disappear.  Even more conveniently, RIM’s CEOs were supporters of Mr. Martin and only too happy to introduce his campaign to their revolutionary devices.

I don’t want to get into a big history lesson here, but the point I’m trying to drive home is that it is impossible to overstate the impact that the Blackberry had on the people working for the Paul Martin campaign, and eventually the entire political class in Ottawa.  The first real Blackberry was released in March of 2003, and almost immediately they were in the hands of nearly every employee of Mr. Martin’s campaign.  More importantly they were just about the coolest goddamn things any of us had ever seen.  I was just a Young Liberal volunteer at this point, but I distinctly remember the first time Mr. Martin came through town with his group of tour officers and advisors, all of them thumbing messages non-stop, thinking that the future had arrived.

In many ways political staffers are the ideal RIM customers.  They tend to be young, educated, and tech-savvy.  They live and die by their email, they have to react to issues constantly and rapidly, and they spend much of their time away from their desks in meetings or on the hill or travelling.  When Mr. Martin became Prime Minister in late 2003, those supporters who had worked on his campaign became political staffers throughout Cabinet and caucus.  They brought their addiction to their Blackberries with them, and more importantly they infected the rest of the government.  By the time I moved to Ottawa to take a job in the Prime Minister’s Office in February 2004, the Blackberry had become the official badge of the political class.  I still remember arriving and being assigned a monochrome Blackberry 7290 almost immediately.²

Pretty quickly the Blackberry became more than just a tool; it was kind of a status symbol.  Political staffers were fanatical about their Blackberries and were RIM’s best customers and advocates.  We’ve all heard the term “Crackberry,” and while I’m sure we’ll never be able to trace it to its origin, I wouldn’t bet against it having been cooked up by some Minister’s Communications Director or Western Desk over beers at D’Arcy McGee’s.  In fact, Ottawa in the mid-2000s was probably the only place on earth where it was ever cool to wear a Blackberry in one of those stupid plastic holsters on your belt.

So, where am I going with this?  Well at some point, things changed.  My last election as an official political staffer was in 2006, but even afterwards the Blackberry was what set the professionals apart from the amateurs in Canadian politics.  During the 2008 election, if you showed up to a meeting or a campaign office with a palm pilot or a windows mobile phone, it was the equivalent of bringing a knife to a gunfight: you were clearly in over your head.  2009 (finally) saw the introduction of the iPhone to Canada, but while the iPhone was a huge success with consumers and businesses, the Blackberry was still the only device a serious political operative would consider.

All of which is to say, political staffers are kind of like the canaries in RIM’s coal mine.  It’s easy to say that RIM’s falling marketshare among consumers is temporary or can be recovered, or that its real domain is the enterprise and that no one does that better, but if the Blackberry’s biggest and most dedicated fans are starting to move away from the platform, that’s when you know RIM is in big trouble.  And indeed, in this most recent election, that’s exactly what I began to see.  I won’t go into detail of all the reasons RIM is hemorrhaging market share, others have already done an excellent job of that, but I will say that I’m pretty much convinced that RIM is beyond recovery at this point.  I am far more technical³ than your average political staffer, and I moved on to Android long ago⁴, but the 2011 election was the first time I could pull out my Google Nexus One in a room full of staffers and not feel the weird sense that I had to explain myself or somehow prove that I belonged despite not having the tool of the trade.

Obviously RIM hasn’t completely lost this market—there were still far more Bolds and Torches than iPhones and Android handsets on the campaigns I worked on—but the fact that there were any iPhones or Samsungs or HTCs at all spells big trouble for the folks in Waterloo.  Political staffers are the most demanding smartphone users on the planet, and if RIM is losing them, then it’s already lost its credibility.

1. This is all based on my hazy recollection of the campaign, historical accuracy should be judged liberally [↩]
2. To this day, that Blackberry is one of the best phones I have ever owned.  It survived almost comical levels of abuse. [↩]
3. read: nerdier [↩]
4. My problems with Android and why my next phone will be an iPhone will likely be the subjects of future posts [↩]