Five years ago, Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, was one of the most well know technology companies in the whole wide world. The BlackBerry dominated the whole cellphone world, having a blackberry was considered a must have for everyone in the business? The BlackBerry came with a wonderful physical keyboard, the addiction to the physical freedom of typing gave the name CrackBerry.
These days, it seem like the CrackBerry is now known as the SlackBerry. The shares of the boosting brand have are lowered by 75 per cent these years. In 2009 Blackberry has 45 per cent share in the smartphone world which has decreased to a shocking 10 percent in 2014, t
The easy explanation for what happened to R.I.M. is that, like so many other companies, it got run over by Apple. But the real problem is that the technology world changed, and R.I.M. didn’t. The BlackBerry was designed for businesses. This stubbornness helped R.I.M. To maintain its true followers who required security and reliability, BB phones worked on their owN BlackBerry Internet Services or BlackBerry Enterprise Services.
This pattern—of winning over business and government markets and then reaching consumers—is a time-honored one but the need of changing with changing need of consumers is where R.I.M lacked behind.
It didn’t. In fact, even as the BlackBerry was at the height of its popularity, we were entering the age of the consumerization of I.T. In this new era, technological diffusion started to flow the other way—from consumers to businesses. Social media went from being an annoying fad in teenagers to an unavoidable part of many businesses work. Tablets, which many initially thought were just underpowered laptops and were considered just showoffs, soon became common among salesmen, hospital staffs,retailers and students. So, too, with the iPhone and Androids. They’ve always been targeted at consumers, and tend to come with stuff that I.T. departments hate, like all those apps. Yet, because employees love them, businesses have adapted (and the iPhone and Androids have upgraded security to make themselves more business-friendly). As a result, the iPhone and Androids now control more than half the corporate mobile market.
Consumerization has been disastrous for R.I.M., because the company has appeared clueless about what consumers want moreover what the consumer needs R.I.M took a long time to come up with a touchscreen phone and when they did, the results were not satisfactory. Although the BlackBerry brand name was once seen as a revolutionary success, over time R.I.M.’s product line became bewilderingly large, with inscrutable model names. If you’re a consumer, do you want the 8300 or the seemingly identical 8330? And the BlackBerry’s closed system has left R.I.M. ill equipped for a world in which phones and tablets are platforms for the whole app ecosystem.
With the consmueristion of IT, blackberry faced another smack as the work environments changed. Being a loyal BlackBerry user since my eighth grade, I personally believe that the closed systems and keeping the brand business oriented may have ruined the shares for company, I decided to be loyal to the brand in the coming years too.
Once a Blackberry User forever a Blackberry user.
Stay tuned for more
