I get the impression that whatever remains of Blackberry today genuinely no longer wants “normal civillian” customers anyway.
That isn’t even a particularly unusual business decision by telecoms and tech equipment suppliers – in the UK there are companies such as Cleartone based in Wales that now usually only deal exclusively with the Police and other blue light services (they did make BBC micro circuit boards briefly during the 1980s) – their ANPR surveillance kit is regarded as some of the best in the World and the Chinese Department of Transport buys it in preference to using their own domestic companies.
You are unlikely to encounter their most common product (a combined radio control head for analogue VHF/UHF and Airwave) unless you are working for the Emergency Services or notice it when you end up in the back of a Police vehicle (Thames Valley Police usually deploy them in their patrol vehicles)
In the USA Harris/Halliburton today only seems to make stingrays and other GSM mobile surveillance equipment; a few decades ago they did make military radio comms equipment as well. Some examples of this are preserved in US radio amateurs collections; I am not 100% sure if Harris ever sold radios directly to civillians – they may well have done so in the early 1970s but abandoned this market as the Japanese companies undercut them and even if the radio amateurs of that era recognised the brand from their military service they weren’t willing to pay the same prices as Uncle Sam did!
All that said, RIM / Blackberry pissed on their own chips in the first place a decade ago by marketing a dumbed down version of their devices/systems at the global chav “community” to start with.
I remember that era from the incident where they shelled out a few million quid to put on this music event foir their resellers in London, with all the usual plastic gangster “urban” music and two middle class white guys who ran mobile phone shops ended up fighting and one was killed from being stabbed in the neck with a broken glass; and that was even before the riots in London.
To be fair I don’t remember RIM marketing the “consumer grade” devices on the grounds that their messaging was any more secure than anyone elses; they only advertised the fact that it was possible and back then had more features than competitors.
However they already had a thriving community of more responsible business users who did (and presumably some still do) use the devices for legitimate purposes and would not have required such things as secret units to assist the Police in tracking criminal use of the devices which is never going to look good when marketing to individuals rather than corporate users.
In 2006/7 having a Blackberry identified you more as a “suit” than a “gangster” anyway It was their own marketing decision to go for a wider user base (and at the same time reducing the build quality and feature count in their devices) that fucked them over in the end. I get the impression John Chen is genuinely trying to reverse this and the only reason RIM still exists is because its remaining workers are trying desparately to avoid going the same way as STC/Nortel but am not sure if it can even be saved.
