Last week it almost went unnoticed that Canadian company Blackberry announced that will no longer manufacture its once-dominant mobile phone (although take heart, diehards! You will still be able to buy them in Indonesia). Instead the company plans to focus on its software offering (good luck with that, with all the competition in that space today!). The demise of the once-dominant device is breathtaking; in 2010 (the year that consumers adopted smart phones en masse) Blackberry commanded 41% of the mobile phone market. Now it’s … 0.1%. If nothing else, Blackberry’s demise should serve as yet another cautionary tale for companies (I’m talking to you, retailers and Brands!) that are totally dependent on consumer goodwill.

So, this is the Blackberry’s last call to us consumers. Goodbye! But I hope history will be kind to the memory of the Blackberry, because the truth is, it was a real game changer. I remember my first Blackberry (I think around 2002), and how it allowed me to get rid of: one flip phone, one pager for home, another pager for work, and a clunky laptop with a modem to read my email. Now, I could get it all on one device, and it was absolutely liberating. And to top it off, I could browse the Web with a browser that was close enough to Netscape to be useable.

Wow! And the funny thing is, the world has changed so quickly since those days that many who read that list of Blackberry’s liberating capabilities might think, “so what? “

The Blackberry at one time also provided one of the most popular texting services available, and was one of the first devices to include an integrated digital camera (in 2006). Wow again! It all culminated in a market cap of $67B in 2007, making it the most valuable company on Canada’s TSX stock exchange. But we all know what happened next. The Apple iPhone happened, and it redefined the user interface for the smart phone in such a compelling way that Blackberry was caught completely off guard, much the same way that Sony was caught flatfooted by Apple in 2001 when the Cupertino company redefined personal music players with the iPod.

The thing is, it wasn’t a surprise that Apple was developing a new “smart ” phone in 2006, a year before its launch – everybody in the industry knew it was coming. Sony’s iPod experience should have been a warning to Blackberry, not so much about an Apple juggernaut (although the company might have been forgiven by 2008 if it thought that it was the Apple logo that turned the tide against them), but about a user interface revolution. The magic of Apple was that the same interface could be used by anyone anywhere, and people could pretty much hack the UI in a few minutes. That should have served as a red light warning that people were fed up with complexity- they wanted solutions that are easy to use and intuitive, offer user-selected functionality, integration between those functions, and guarantee bulletproof performance (Android still doesn’t get this, and neither does Microsoft Windows… and there’s great fear-and-loathing that in the post-Steve Jobs age, Apple is starting to forget it too).

Remember The Blackberry

So goodbye Blackberry, but I hope other businesses that serve consumers heed the lesson that Blackberry taught us: consumers want solutions to their lifestyle needs that are easier to use than to ignore. That’s not just a lesson for technology-related things like a website or a mobile app, but for the whole Brand offering. Remember that list: consumers want solutions that are easy to use and intuitive, offer user-selected functionality, integration between those functions, and guarantee bulletproof performance.

Can your Brand promise that for the whole experience?