“Once a Canadian national champion, the company is seen as ripe for a sale after misjudging the smartphone revolution,” Paul Taylor and Neil Munshi report for The Financial Times.
“After starting her career in New York’s financial services industry five years ago, Carrie Sin was rarely without her BlackBerry. Like millions of white-collar workers around the globe, she felt a sort of enforced allegiance to it. ‘I always had it for work and it was easier to stick with one device. Also, I was used to the keyboard,’ she says,” Taylor and Munshi report. “But the appeal of her BlackBerry began to wane as more of her friends bought iPhones. Socially, it was like being stuck at the office while everyone else was at a party. “I was left off group texts and the running joke when my friends would email about new apps would include something like: ‘Carrie has a BlackBerry so her only app is [to use it as a] paperweight.'”
Taylor and Munshi report, “So in May, she finally made the switch. The experience, says Ms Sin, was ‘life-changing. Really.’ She is not alone. In the fiscal first quarter BlackBerry’s subscriber base fell by 4m to 72m. Its longtime strength – corporate users such as Ms Sin – has been unable to insulate it from the touch and app-driven smartphone revolution unleashed by Apple’s iPhone.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “RIM. Dead Company Walking.” – MacDailyNews, August 5, 2010
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Beleaguered BlackBerry explores sale of company– August 12, 2013
Beleaguered BlackBerry shares drop 7% as Z10′s U.S. launch gets subdued reception – March 22, 2013
Gartner: Beleaguered BlackBerry in an ‘extremely difficult’ spot – March 19, 2013
Why the Z10 won’t save beleaguered Blackberry – March 11, 2013
What are they talking about? Everybody knows Blackberry is about 1,000,000 times better than iPhone. Just read this for proof!
http://applesoft.tumblr.com/
(sarcasm mode off)
Carrie Sinned with the iPhone while still carrying a Torch for BlackBerry.
They were doing so well in 2006.
Horse buggy whips did well in their time, too.
Yup, and the Model T in 1908 changed Everything Forever.
Miss the curves on a mountain road or life’s other inflection points and you die.
If you used a computer and cell phone in January 2007 and watched Steve Jobs, you understood instantly that the cell phone world just went upside down. If not you were, well, a Co-CEO of RIM.
They has plenty of opportunity to make up for their mistakes. It would have been as simple as joining the Android bandwagon and setting it with better security.
They had a cash cow, got lazy, arrogant and couldn’t be bothered when business started to slide.
Their big problem is they continued to cling to their BB services and trying to wrap a touch OS around that. BB actually had a couple of innovative ideas, but they were not fully baked when released and they failed to attract developers.
Unfortunately for BB, creating an OS is much more difficult than anyone likes to think. Just look at the smartphone landscape and all of the mobile OSes scattered along the way, many hyped-up but never really released.
BB is a great story for a tech company which is a one-hit wonder, and a warning to companies like Apple to never be satisfied with what you have achieved. There is always someone else looking to either do it better or leapfrog the status quo.
Yes, and now they are about to go kaput. And a lot of people are about to lose their jobs. That’s never a good scenario. Either the company would be sold off in pieces or some damn Chinese company will buy them. Those two CEOs should be ashamed of themselves.
One of those RIM co-CEO’s (Balsillie?) really, really believed in the mechanical keyboard and thought that touch keyboards weren’t efficient enough for typing text. He probably held back RIM for a long time. A lot of companies believed that mechanical keyboards were better than touch screens but most were able to adapt to the times. I’ve got nothing against a smartphone with a mechanical keyboard but you really have to give up a lot of display area. For texting it’s fine but it compromises practically everything else. I hate to see BB go out of business because a lot of employees depend on that company for a living, but maybe there’s not much hope left if consumers don’t need another OS around. Wall Street seems just about ready to pick through BlackBerry’s bones.
BB was arrogant and dismissed Apple as a loser to even try to compete in the smartphone market. BB believed their email ability was all it needed to compete with Apple and continue the lock in of customers. There is the keyword. They gambled the jewels on email ability.
I wouldn’t say that BB was arrogant, I would say that their 2 co-CEOs were, and maybe some of the top management, but they were only a portion of the company. Too bad they had control over the rest of it and everyone’s lives that worked there, because they were and are morons, and got well paid for screwing over the company and everyone else that worked for it.
Good point. Not all, just the top arrogant leaders who believed they were masters of the universe!
Twimoon1,
And just who do you think run the company? the janitor, the production workers???
The management direct and move the company. If they are arrogant, then the company acts arrogantly. And yes they screwed up royally.
Sad but true.
Skated to where the puck never was.
“…misjudging the smartphone revolution..”
Translation: Were one of the incumbents that would have been happy to keep selling us all plastic-keyed junk had Apple not taken us to the next level.
I noticed today that Staples is dumping the BlackBerry PlayBook at fire sale prices. Bye-bye!