The decline and fall of Blackberry

[Barciad]

4 - 5 years ago, it was a market leader, innovator, and trend setter. Now it is up for sale. What on earth happened, what went wrong? Why is the world of technology so uncompromising?
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/12/blackberry-for-sale-smartphone-market

 

[Total LOLige]

My guess its they thought "iPhone is super expensive it's going to tank, no point innovating". I'm not really into all this tech stuff so I don't have a clue.

 

[Esotera]

Technology changes very quickly and it's pretty much the norm for massive companies to fail within a couple of years, just like myspace. Blackberry also now have a whole lot of competition as Android and Apple are credible business alternatives, and are basically better in every way possible.

 

[Drakane]

As Sleekit mentioned, Blackberry is/was a business person driven device and was also one of the first if not the first wide spread smartphone with the capabilities that it had. I still know people that use them because it is one of the easiest to interface with Microsoft Outlook (at least in my experience). It held its niche int he market for a wile, but as other products and brands: Samsung, iPhone, Droid, etc. have been able to replicate similar functions for the business goer, they have also innovated in other areas and it seems as though Blackberry is/was still just a phone that you could get your work email from.

 

[KP Shadow]

As everyone else has mentioned, Blackberry was pretty much mainly used in the business world, and Windows Phone has pretty much replaced it as "The businessman's smartphone".

 

[Nuxxy]

Blackberry introduced a lot of features at the right time. Strong email integration, chat services, BIS to reduce data costs. But their handsets were not good quality, and they were slow to develop. At the moment, none of their features aren't found on other handsets, usually in better forms. Don't ask "what happened? what went wrong?" The answer is found in asking "why would you use a Blackberry today?"

To a degree, the same can be said of Nokia. And next to fall will be Apple, simply for their "one model fits all" false dichotomy.

 

[Jadak]

Blackberry was never a mainstream product.

That doesn't actually seem to be true... Yes, it's reputation at it's height (and since, for some people I know) was as a quality business product, but it's sales were very much mainstream.

As the article in the OP points out, Blackberry market share in the US was once in the 50% region. Or to pull a quote from Wikipedia "In the United States, the BlackBerry hit its peak in September 2010, when almost 22 million users, or 37% of the 58.7 million American smartphone users at the time were using a BlackBerry".

It may have been most popular with business folk, but 37% is not a niche market. Even now, if you've got a product with 22 million users, 'niche' is hardly a term that applies. I never found them particularly impessive, but they definitely had the mainstream thing going for a while.

Hell, I still know people (non-business types, mainstreaming common folk of the most common variety) who got their BBs years ago 'because they were cool', going with the 'fads' of the time, and are still stubborningly clinging to the things.

 

[Hoplon]

Blackberry was never a mainstream product.

That doesn't actually seem to be true... Yes, it's reputation at it's height (and since, for some people I know) was as a quality business product, but it's sales were very much mainstream.

As the article in the OP points out, Blackberry market share in the US was once in the 50% region. Or to pull a quote from Wikipedia "In the United States, the BlackBerry hit its peak in September 2010, when almost 22 million users, or 37% of the 58.7 million American smartphone users at the time were using a BlackBerry".

It may have been most popular with business folk, but 37% is not a niche market. Even now, if you've got a product with 22 million users, 'niche' is hardly a term that applies. I never found them particularly impessive, but they definitely had the mainstream thing going for a while.

Hell, I still know people (non-business types, mainstreaming common folk of the most common variety) who got their BBs years ago 'because they were cool', going with the 'fads' of the time, and are still stubborningly clinging to the things.

Problem with that was that they also had a phone as well as a blackberry, so when lots of things came along that also did what the BB did people ditched the BB.

 

[somonels]

Countries, UAE, USA, Russia, started pressuring it with sanctions unless given means decrypt the communications/track the phone/allow access to it. It finally caved, and it became a non-factor as the security was it's selling point.

It's not dead though, the userbase has been continuously rising but the market share held was that of smartphones, it was drowned out by the iOS and jOS. Last year it had 79 million users globally.

 

[Frezzato]

At my last job they threw the task of phone admin on me. We had tons of Blackberry phones and the ones that people turned in were just disgusting. Mainly it was the track ball. I would check out the ones people turned in and try to find them a working one. Color me surprised when I saw that the trackball was actually supposed to be white! The ones people had were jet black. Ugh. No wonder they stopped working.

I had some other handsets that were never issued, some touch screens. I think they were called the Storm. It was this awful glass screen that would actually move at a pivot point, center screen. Every time I tried to select something I would choose something right next to what I wanted, all because of the damn screen movement.

Beyond that, my IT admin was always bitching about having to maintain the Blackberry Enterprise Server, or BES. I'm not sure if it was virtualized but he definitely hated having to access it. We eventually moved onto--WINDOWS PHONES believe it or not. All of a sudden we couldn't utilize the Cisco Unified Communications that were available for Blackberry and iPhone, simply because Microsoft had a competing product. And then the executives were issued iPhones. We were using both Verizon and AT&T because the new IT admin wanted to play around with different technologies. What a nightmare that was.

It wasn't RIM's fault though. I think it's mainly because companies hire people who don't know what they're talking about, and they have to do more with less. And maintaining the BES just wasn't worth the headache.

 

[Psychobabble]

4 - 5 years ago, it was a market leader, innovator, and trend setter. Now it is up for sale. What on earth happened, what went wrong? Why is the world of technology so uncompromising?
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/12/blackberry-for-sale-smartphone-market

Well kinda the same answer as "why have most business professionals stopped using a Filofax?", or "Why isn't AOL the number one internet provider any more?", because technology and social trends change very quickly. Companies that can't move fast enough to adapt to new changes perish and are usurped by more desirable rivals.

However in the case of Blackberry I feel that the NTP lawsuit caused people to move on to greener pastures a little faster than would have otherwise been the case.

 

[DANEgerous]

It founds it foothold in the business world got pushed past it the decided "Hell no! I want to be a businesses phone!" I recall they had a string of ads proclaiming the phones as "tools not toys" to which everyone responded "you don not understand my current phone is both of of those" it is as if the looked at the top selling apps and said to them selves okay all our competitors have are games let us make something new... business apps only to get the reply that those exist.

They almost came off as having this fierce desire to pigeonholed they did business stuff not fun stuff. What do we have Android and iOS do not, limitations! There is no market for limitations.

 

[omega 616]

I remember hearing celebs were into blackberrys but not so much businesses.

I got mine as a kind of go between from the standard "press the 2 button three times for C" to the touch screen phones.

With the iphone being in almost every pocket (and ques outside shops from the early hours before a new launch) you can say that it's crushing the competition, a lot of others have android and a small minority have blackberrys.

It's like Nokia used to be top dog in the phone world, everybody had 3310 or 3330 and I'm sure there was another Nokia that everybody just had to have and it's the now iphone.

 

[ForumSafari]

What on earth happened, what went wrong?

Blackberry is an enterprise offering primarily, it's main selling point was secure mail delivery and tight integration with your Exchange environment. They're easily taken to bits too so they're repairable and they have a keyboard for emails. Blackberry have decreased in popularity because they started gunning for consumers, they compromised on quality, are overpriced on the contracts that offer them and offer features business don't care about to justify their price.

The big thing is that most businesses don't really care about their phones, they're under the IT department purview but have nothing to interest IT aside from whether you can wipe them and whether you can encrypt them. Generally a business will just renew their phone contract with whatever new handset they're offered. Some companies pony up for iPhones for the brand image but a lot of businesses are actually still using Blackberries because they're still running and the new consumer grade ones are crap, they're just not buying new ones.

Beyond that, my IT admin was always bitching about having to maintain the Blackberry Enterprise Server, or BES.

That's weird, I manage BES servers in my job and I've never noticed them being all that twitchy, especially compared to the damn Exchange server that they hang off of.

 

[Angie7F]

I think blackberries cool when phones had tiny screens.
not you dont need keyboards.