BlackBerry is celebrating its tenth anniversary this week at the company’s Wireless Enterprise Symposium and there’s plenty to celebrate says co-CEO Jim Balsillie.

“In the first nine years we sold 25 million BlackBerrys and in the tenth year we sold 26 million; we sold more in our tenth year than the first nine [together].”

The big difference over those 10 years isn’t just specific features, but the fact that BlackBerry is now a platform “and it’s put tremendous responsibilities on the whole system”.

Many of those 26 million BlackBerrys were Pearls and Storms going to consumers, although traditional business users aren’t giving up. “We grew 84 per cent this past year,” says Balsillie; “consumer is bigger than the enterprise for us now, even though enterprise grew by double digits last quarter.”

When Tech Radar asked about the iPhone, he said Apple had done RIM a favour. “The iPhone did great benefit to the market; it really helped having this validation that you should listen to music on your cellphone. We’ve seen a whole market develop. I could never have marketed and created that – Apple validated it and that was a huge advantage. Look how we grew 15-20 per cent last quarter. How did the iPhone do last quarter? They shrank 42 per cent last quarter – from 6.9 to 3.9 – didn’t they?”

Working differently

In his view, the tight control Apple exercises means less choice all round. “Their way, it’s their store, their product and the carrier is a reseller. That’s not a moral statement about good and bad, right and wrong – there are choices. If you’re playing a leverage card end to end that’s fine; we work with a different environment.

“We’ve chosen to play the enabling card and the diversity card. We want our ecosystem to have the enabling possibilities, we want the customer to have the choice of handsets, we want the carrier to be a managed services platform – but we want the developer to have the common platform element. That puts a fair bit of inherent complexity in for us, but we still manage complexity well at RIM.”

Although RIM has launched its own store called BlackBerry App World, created its own Facebook app and bought a media distribution tool (Chalk Media), that doesn’t mean it’s trying to span the business the way Apple does.

“We’re not in the app business, we’re in the partnership business, the efficiency business, we’re in the interface business and I think that serves us well. Once you cross over to the app, it seems enticing but is that your core competency? Can you scale? What kind of strategic difference can you make? Look at the rich diversity of music [on smartphones]. One person can’t do everything and leverage everything.”

There were no new handset announcements this week, but there’s already plenty of variety in BlackBerry compared to the iPhone, Balsillie claims, from a flip phone to the new Curve, as well as the Bold and the Storm.

Why no Wi-Fi on the Storm?

“People are very demanding. As you use different applications, as this becomes more personal we’re seeing a lot of demands for diversity in form factor. People want their preference. It’s not the era of the Model T – any colour as long as it’s black.”

Incidentally, there were several reasons for leaving Wi-Fi out of the Storm, he claimed, with requests from Vodafone and Verizon as much to blame as the physical lack of space. “It was a new chip, it wasn’t mature – in that ‘how much do you want to roll the dice?’. But it was just a specification thing at the time really. That’s what they wanted – but markets change.”

He isn’t worried by the Palm Pre either. “Palm is saying they have 100,000 developers. I’m not sure how that’s relevant, but on the PIM (Personal Information Management) we really only have to do a good enough job to start with. Once you put efficient comms in, the comms changes the app. [With Palm] they’re trying to sell richness and richness and you haven’t got efficient push.

“You look at music now on the BlackBerry, you have cached radio with Slacker, you can sync with iTunes or Windows Media Player, you have XM satellite radio, I heart radio, radio through Pandora, Rhapsody, user-generated content with Dipdive – it’s diverse. The point is that enabling comms does that, it become the transformativeness of music.”

Apps are going to keep on changing, he says, but declines to make any predictions. “The whole nature of the application changes but as it is very hard for us to see these disruptors until they happen, we assume the world is going to carry on the way it is.

“And when they happen, the brain has this great rationaliser; ‘OK, that’s true now so I’m going to carry on in this way as if no other disrupters are ever going to happen’. These apps are going to be different in a year in ways we can’t imagine.”

But what i have to ask them is so 26 million units in 10 years… Way to go Rim!

Shame that Apple shipped 20 Million in 2.

All this Rimapalooza fanfare blowing is all well and good except that they have been holed beneath the waterline. Their “We outsold the iPhone last quarter” came at a cost, effectively charging 49 bucks a unit for the 83xx series. Great for “units shipped” not so good for bottom line. Yes I know it is the carriers taking the hit mostly on this -but you can’t keep doing this and remain profitable. But still a very good outing for RIM this quarter.

[Via Tehc Radar]