Analysis BlackBerry, which recently suffered one of the most sudden and catastrophic crashes of any technology company, begins its comeback on Wednesday. For John Chen's firm, it marks the end of almost 18 months in the wilderness and out of the public eye.

But the Canadian mobile firm is still going, and just about breaking even – it's just much smaller than it was. BlackBerry's revenue in its most recent quarter was under $1bn, making it a sub-$4bn a year company - a third of what it was raking in two years ago, and just a fifth of its FY 2011 peak. With no new hardware for almost two years, this isn't surprising.

But BlackBerry has quietly been putting the pieces for a recovery in place some time, undoing the damage caused by the simultaneous "Big Bang" updates to both server and the handset platform releases at the start of 2013. It was these updates that finally pushed the company off the edge.

The problem was that although BlackBerry had done the hard work in the preceding decade, and had a "stickiness" in slow-upgrade-cycle enterprises and loyalty amongst consumers, it had left it very late to do both - long enough for alternatives to mature.

BlackBerry had risen as a bundle, an integrated collection of three things: a proprietary handset, network and server – with the value being greater than the sum of the parts. Once the market had matured, each part of the bundle became valued individually, and was worth less than BlackBerry might have imagined. The bundle had helped the firm rise fast. So the unpicking of the bundle made it crash fast, too.

The company formerly known as RIM had tried to be too ambitious with its client update, and too arrogant with the server pricing. You needed the new BES10 to manage the new BB10, but BES10 didn't support the legacy BlackBerry devices – which meant the "Big Bang" became an opportunity for businesses to dump both, and start afresh.

On the phone side, BlackBerry was also too ambitious, and had the curse of a new platform that wasn't mature. Based on the highly efficient and reliable QNX Neutrino, BB10 had swelled into a monster that needed 2GB of RAM, more than the iPhone 6 features today, 1GB. This priced it way beyond what BlackBerry's market could afford, or wanted to pay. The prospect of a smooth transition was also harmed by the immaturity of the system, which presented loyalists with a very unfamiliar UI. It was also buggy - while it was full of good ideas, with fundamentals such as text manipulation only really just sorted out now, in the forthcoming release.

One reader called it a "burn all bridges" strategy.

And because RIM had left it so late, it couldn't smooth the disruption by using revenues from its legacy platform to fund the transition. If RIM had launched both BES10 in 2011, it may still have been a hard sell - but the transition would have been cushioned by rising revenues from the legacy hardware. In 2010, more than half the market did not yet have a full touch smartphone – and there were still 8.5 million BlackBerry users in the UK less than two years ago. It's now very hard to buy one.