Few weeks ago, the once very respected smartphone giant, BlackBerry, announced that it will discontinue the production of phones. Yes, we will soon be showing our kids BlackBerry phones at the museums.
That’s kind of funny because I recall scheming to buy my first BlackBerry Phone and it was a dream come true when I eventually did. It was a fairly used BlackBerry! Having a fairly used BlackBerry Storm was a big deal for me. I barely slept that night. I was happy to wake up at night to check for the blinking red light notification and the sweet sound of a “Ping”. Back then, it was a thing of prestige to carry a BlackBerry phone. Students showed off theirs at bars and clubs. Corporate executives proudly displayed theirs on the conference table during meetings. Commuters would barely be seated before pulling out their BlackBerry in a lame attempt to show off.
This was kind of understandable considering how popular BlackBerry was at that time.
How Big Was BlackBerry?
At their peak, BlackBerry, had about 85 million subscribers (September 2013). Now in 2016, they have about 23 million subscribers.
As at the second quarter of 2010, only Nokia’s Symbian Operating System (41.2%) had more market share than BlackBerry (18.2%). Six years later, BlackBerry is struggling to hold on to its Smartphone market share of about 0.1% (Don’t even ask me what happened to Nokia’s Symbian Operating System). Annual revenue for 2010 was approximately $20bn while 2015 figure was a meagre $2.1bn.
Why Did the Mighty Fall?
There are different theories on what led to the demise of BlackBerry. The highlights:
1. Physical Keyboard– BlackBerry continued to make more and more phones with their very popular “QWERTY” keyboard. Generation Y and Z preferred the touchscreens. First of all, it allows for a larger screen when watching movies and the likes on your phone. It was easier to type or scroll to icons by simply pointing on them.
2. The Apps were terrible. BlackBerry Operating System was awful, slow, unstable, better and more apps were on iOS and Android systems. Blackberry was selling a healthy number of phones built with its BlackBerryOS. It even tried to bring Android apps to its BB10 platform. But the OS released in 2013 couldn’t catch up with Android and iOS.
4. BlackBerry’s decision not to switch to Android Operating System: Blackberry is on the verge of extinction because of the lack of an app ecosystem. For any new operating system to thrive, it simply has to tackle the app problem in an innovative manner
5. The creation of WhatsApp. BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) was a major reason why some people bought BlackBerry. Then came WhatsApp which was better, easier to use, doesn’t require a PIN, cuts across different platforms, tells you when your contacts are online, etc. These qualities of WhatsApp coupled with the fact that BBM became available on other operating system combined forces to affect BlackBerry’s market share of the instant message market. Don’t forget iMessage.
For the purpose of this research and what you can learn from it to help “future-proof” your career, I want to discuss what I feel ultimately led to the demise of BlackBerry:
1. They failed to learn and adapt fast to changing consumer tastes and preferences much like the skilled typist who failed to learn to use the computer. Similar will be the fate of an experienced banker who isn’t watching the shift to all things digital due to the impact of technology.
2. They failed to diversify their competitive advantage. They competed majorly on the BBM feature. The convergence of technology and almost everything else these days means that you cannot compete on a single front.
Let me explain:
- Apple changed its name from Apple Computer Inc. to Apple Inc. and went on to sell you iPod, music on iTunes, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV Digital media player, Beats Headphones etc. Please, bear in mind that Apple was already successful selling the Mac. In essence, Apple transformed itself from a hardware company to a hardware-software-and-service company!
- Microsoft is no longer just a software company. It is now also a hardware company (Xbox), a tablet and phone company as well.
- Google is no longer just a search engine. It also owns a phone company (Motorola), it has a venture capital arm (Google Capital), amongst other businesses.
- Snapchat, the image and video messaging app, now makes hardware (Spectacles)
If these companies want to compete on different fronts, don’t you think it’s time for you to do the same?
- Very soon, if you are a banker, it would no longer be sufficient to simply be a good credit analyst, for example. You have to know programming, product development, customer service, risk management, compliance, operations etc. A company is more likely to fire a good credit analyst than a good credit analyst who is also a programmer. You get my point, right?
- If you are an English language teacher, it wouldn’t hurt to know French, German and Chinese as well.
- If you are a photographer, you better have social media skills, business analysis skills, data mining and storytelling skills etc.
The Mistakes That Killed a Once-Great Device (BLACKBERRY)
It’s no secret that Research in Motion, the Waterloo, Ontario–based company that makes the BlackBerry, has opened a second headquarters in Strugglesville. The company’s stock price has done a nosedive in the last eighteen months, as has the percentage of U.S. smartphone users who choose the BlackBerry — that’s down to 8.1 percent, according to a recent. RIM has been forced to lay off thousands of employees, shutter, and in a particularly desperate move, sell one of its.
1. It had an identity crisis.
Years ago, BlackBerry had a huge following in corporate America — legion were the lawyers, consultants, and Wall Street bankers who could not live without their BlackBerry fix. But at a certain point, RIM decided it wanted everyone to live in BlackBerry nation. So it made a play for the mainstream, introducing ham-handed products like a streaming music player called that, to this day, nobody outside Waterloo has ever heard of.
For years, BlackBerry has been seemingly divided on the question of what the BlackBerry should be — a popular device that can compete with the iPhone or a business tool aimed at the enterprise market.
2. It didn’t play well with others.
But the broader reason BlackBerry should have moved to the U.S. is that it might have made it more likely to team up with American tech companies. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison considered buying Blackberry as an inroad into the mobile business. Surely there are other tech moguls who considered doing deals at the height of the BlackBerry’s popularity but balked because of the difficulty involved in pulling off cross-border collaborations which might save Blackberry in the end, but it’s almost certainly too little too late. What Blackberry needed years ago was to open up its products — like BBM, e-mail, and its corporate security services — to developers and platforms like Android and iOS. That would have kept BlackBerry in the American tech ecosphere and allowed it to make money from the growth of other platforms, rather than freezing all alone in Ontario.
3. It couldn’t cut and run.
Every tech company makes bad products. What good tech companies do, in situations like these, is discontinue the thing that isn’t working and move on.
You don’t double down on unpopular products — a lesson Blackberry hasn’t learned at all, judging from the way it has handled the PlayBook tablet rollout. Even though the PlayBook was essentially DOA (its lack of native e-mail doomed it from day one) Blackberry has continued to market the unpopular tablet.
4. It forgot the geeks.
What sensible programmer, after all, would build an app for an operating system that might never see the light of day? Make no mistake: BlackBerry still has a few arrows left in its quiver, including a pile of cash estimated at $2.2 billion and a valuable proprietary network. But cash dwindles, and networks become less valuable as other carriers catch up. The BlackBerry subscribers (and giant corporations) who went through the hassle of switching to iPhones or Androids in the past few years aren’t coming back, even if BlackBerry 10 is the best operating system since MS-DOS.
So, let the last rites for BlackBerry begin. Because, when you have to hire Questlove to convince people that your product is still cool, a graceful end is about the best you can wish for.
We are witnessing the convergence of skills such that no singular skill guarantees survival.
In 2008, Apple invited developers to build applications for iPhones. Similarly, for Android, Google announced its Play Store in 2008 and opened it to developers. These decisions proved to be pivotal to the whole smartphone ecosystem. Going forward, apps expanded the capabilities of the smartphone and created incredible solutions for everyday problems.
I will end with a quote by Bill Gates: “Every time we think we have had a little bit of success, we’re pretty careful not to dwell on it too much because the bar gets raised”
REFERENCES
www.huffingtonpost.in/2016/09/30/the-reason-behind-the-death-of-blackberry-and-nokia/
techcrunch.com/2008/07/10/app-store-launches-upgrade-itunes-now
nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/07/how-the-blackberry-died.html
www.slashgear.com/Nielsen-android-and-iphone-both-made-gains-in-q2-2012
businessweek.com/news/2012-07-10/rim-said-to-sell-jet-to-help-save
NOTE: This was a reseach work carried out for educative and informative purpose, kindly peruse and and send your comments and recommendation to azeez.abdul@courtevillegroup.com
