Before Apple and Google decided to get into mobile devices, Blackberry was the dominant player in smartphones. They had a range of devices that had tiny but surprisingly useable keyboards and allowed business people to send and receive emails while on the move.
RIM was actually Canada’s most profitable company for a while with a share price of $150 a share. Today, their share price is barely $10 (in my opinion it’s likely to slip more in coming weeks).
So where did it all go wrong?
Blackberry was one of the must have devices of the mid 2000’s for a lot of business people. The first Blackberry (the 850) was actually a 2 way pager and was launched around 1999 it allowed email communication but was very basic. It ran on a proprietary data only network so could never be capable of being a phone.
Later, RIM brought out devices that used GSM networks (normal 2G mobile networks) which meant that they could start to offer a device that was a phone as well as being an email platform and these devices were very popular.
Because Blackberry grew from a dedicated data network, they charged differently and as such, they managed the charging for the data connections and provided software at an extra cost to allow you to link your email server into their service. This worked really well for a good while but then Apple and Google arrived to spoil the party.
In 2007, Apple brought along the iPhone which was only 2G (the same as Blackberrys at the time) but crucially had no keyboard and relied on a touch screen for everything. This makes a lot of sense for some applications because for things like web browsing or photo viewing, the keyboard is pointless and just takes up space when it’s not needed. That said, the Blackberry was still firmly aimed at corporate email types so they were different beasts really.
The biggest problem for Blackberry was that the iPhone was also very good at emailing. Being able to view full HTML emails was a really useful feature when a lot of other mobile platforms couldn’t do anything like that.
These days, Apple and Android have pretty much taken over the smartphone world with Android being the best-selling mobile operating system and iPhone being the single most popular phone.
Unfortunately for Blackberry, the World has moved on considerably and they seem to be desperately clinging to an outdated business model in the hope that something will change. The bad news is that it won’t.
On non-Blackberry smartphones, I can connect the phone to my email account and, when I spend all day in front of my real computer reading my email, those emails will show up as “read” in my mobile inbox. Not on a Blackberry unless I go to the trouble of having special software installed on the server. Sadly for me I’m the sort of person who likes a nice tidy inbox with no messages showing as unread so this is a real problem. All other smartphones can do this without extra software – why can’t Blackberry?
My Android or Apple phone can connect to the internet, download apps, send messages/etc with just a data connection from my mobile provider or Wi-Fi. A Blackberry can’t – I have to have a subscription to the Blackberry service. Recently I was playing with a Blackberry phone on a pay as you go SIM card and even though I had a full Wi-Fi connection I wasn’t allowed to update the phone’s software or connect to the app store without paying for a connection through the phone network.
There have been high profile incidents where Blackberry smartphones couldn’t do anything with web or email for days because of failures in the Blackberry network. In my opinion, the business model of having to subscribe to their service is now outdated and wrong. When you look at the history, it’s easy to see why they did it but things moved on and they should have too.
Sadly now it’s probably too late for them to change. They must derive huge revenues from this model and despite the fact that their market share is practically in free-fall, changing that business model is a very scary proposition that the board probably aren’t brave enough to do.
I think this is a real shame. My wife has a Blackberry Torch which I actually like. In day to day terms, it is useable and having a touch screen, a keyboard and the little thumb pad is really nice.
I find that there are lots of silly little usability problems with the Blackberry OS but I’m going to cover some of that stuff in a different blog post. For the most part, it’s not a bad device at all. The problem is – it just isn’t good enough compared to the Android and iPhone devices on the market.
RIM is in the process of demonstrating their latest (and long overdue) operating system to the World – BB10. Can they halt the decline? I seriously doubt it.
This isn’t a new story, throughout the business world the same thing has happened over and over again. Markets change, technology evolves and can kill or seriously maim massive companies because they fail to adapt to the changes – either because they don’t see the changes coming or because they hope they will go away!
Polaroid, Kodak, Blockbuster, Motorola, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, Altavista, Borders and Waterstones are some examples. The list of companies that have suffered massive market share losses goes on and on.
Sometimes, we have to take some very tough and brave decisions in order to move with the times. If we don’t, failure will follow.
My Android or Apple phone can connect to the internet, download apps, send messages/etc with just a data connection from my mobile provider or Wi-Fi. A Blackberry can’t – I have to have a subscription to the Blackberry service. Recently I was playing with a Blackberry phone on a pay as you go SIM card and even though I had a full Wi-Fi connection I wasn’t allowed to update the phone’s software or connect to the app store without paying for a connection through the phone network.
There have been high profile incidents where Blackberry smartphones couldn’t do anything with web or email for days because of failures in the Blackberry network. In my opinion, the business model of having to subscribe to their service is now outdated and wrong. When you look at the history, it’s easy to see why they did it but things moved on and they should have too.
Sadly now it’s probably too late for them to change. They must derive huge revenues from this model and despite the fact that their market share is practically in free-fall, changing that business model is a very scary proposition that the board probably aren’t brave enough to do.
I think this is a real shame. My wife has a Blackberry Torch which I actually like. In day to day terms, it is useable and having a touch screen, a keyboard and the little thumb pad is really nice.
I find that there are lots of silly little usability problems with the Blackberry OS but I’m going to cover some of that stuff in a different blog post. For the most part, it’s not a bad device at all. The problem is – it just isn’t good enough compared to the Android and iPhone devices on the market.
RIM is in the process of demonstrating their latest (and long overdue) operating system to the World – BB10. Can they halt the decline? I seriously doubt it.
This isn’t a new story, throughout the business world the same thing has happened over and over again. Markets change, technology evolves and can kill or seriously maim massive companies because they fail to adapt to the changes – either because they don’t see the changes coming or because they hope they will go away!
Polaroid, Kodak, Blockbuster, Motorola, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, Altavista, Borders and Waterstones are some examples. The list of companies that have suffered massive market share losses goes on and on.
Sometimes, we have to take some very tough and brave decisions in order to move with the times. If we don’t, failure will follow.
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