A fruit name for a high-tech company? It's Apple's choice, along with the apple. But it is also the decision of BlackBerry, whose inspiration comes from the blackberry.

Who could have imagined, at the turn of the 2010s, that BlackBlerry would witness the collapse of its market share in smartphones? Yet this is what happened for the Canadian group, which could not resist the tidal wave of touch screens (which made physical keyboards disappear) and Android, which imposed itself from all manufacturers except Apple.

Like the Cupertino company, moreover, the brand has drawn its identity from fruit. In English, blackberry means blackberry, and that owes nothing to chance. Indeed, the choice of this name comes from the observations of a consulting firm, which noted that the external appearance of smartphones vaguely resembles the flesh of certain fruits. This is what the Quartz site said in 2013.

A product that looked like the surface of a fruit

“At the time, they [BlackBerry , Editor's note] were faced with pagers, and everyone had a pager,” explained David Placek, the boss of the consulting firm Lexicon, which had been recruited by RIM to find an identity for its product. “You have to have a really distinctive name. The interested party answered questions from Alastair Sweeny for a book devoted to the BlackBerry ecosystem.

We are then in 1998 and Research In Motion (RIM) is not yet called BlackBerry. The era is not for smartphones. It is a question of launching a device capable of reading emails – the net then broke through to the general public. Names circulate, such as RIM 950 or RIM 960, but also some more explicit suggestions, like PocketLink or MegaMail.

Ironically, the presence of a keyboard on the device, which was not a telephone, was considered revolutionary at the time, even though it was he who participated in the fall of RIM, by making him miss the turn of the touch screens. It was he who inspired the Lexicon teams: the layout of the keys on the surface of the device and their shape evoked the round shapes that cross the surface of strawberries and blackberries.

A blackberry with its characteristic blistered surface. // Source: Kelli Matthews

In a 2011 New Yorker article on the origin of the most famous product and company names, it is explained that the blackberry (blackberry) which was favored over the strawberry (strawberry), because the pronunciation was considered to be more dynamic: “someone wrote 'strawberry'. Then someone wrote next, 'strawberry is too slow'. Placek said the word - 'Str-a-a-a-w-w-berry' - while drawing it. “This technology is instantaneous,” he noted.

However, the final choice still required weeks of reflection. “The process of selecting a name from hundreds of applicants can be arduous, and often comes down to a combination of instinct, abstract reasoning and client requests,” the magazine said in its article.

BlackBerry ended up in a tight list of about forty names, which was gradually reduced. David Placek and RIM “ended up convincing themselves of the BlackBerry name. They decided that its benefits were not limited to associations with fruits that lower blood pressure. The word ‘black’ evoked the color of high-tech devices,” in addition to its blackberry-like appearance.

Blackberry Z10.

Just before the launch of the BlackBerry in 1999, a few final touches were made. The second letter of the name is capitalized to emphasize it and play on linguistic considerations. "Lexicon funded a linguistic study whose results suggested that the sound of the letter b was one of the most 'reliable' of any language," reported the New Yorker.

The success has been there for more than ten years. The name then spread throughout the company, inspiring that of the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant messaging service. In fact, this identity grew to such an extent that it eventually took over RIM. In 2013, the Canadian company chose to rename itself BlackBerry. But by then, it was already too late for the bitten apple.