Beleaguered BlackBerry: Sometimes the best a company can hope for is death

13 years ago

“The Financial Times has carried an unusual number of obituaries and stories of terminal illness this summer,” John Kay writes for Financial Times. “There was the bankruptcy of Detroit and the slide into administration of once-ubiquitous companies, such as Jessops, the high-street camera retailer. Then there was last week’s announcement of the continuing troubles of BlackBerry, which made the defining business product of the first decade of the 21st century.”

“Humans have always found it hard to cope with the idea that every individual has a lifespan even as life itself goes on. The idea of a natural life cycle for a business, or industrial centre, is even more difficult to accepte,” Kay writes. “The marketing guru Theodore Levitt elaborated this theme in an article half a century ago. Levitt denounced marketing myopia. There was always, he suggested, a future for a company; the key was to look for a creative answer to the question: “What business are we in?” Manufacturers of buggy whips might still be around as carmakers if they had only understood that they were not simply encouraging faster horses; they were transport companies.”

Kay writes, “As Jessops shows, a business in decline can fall into a downward spiral: what would attract young professionals to Detroit, or able technologists to BlackBerry? The problem is not solved by fostering illusions about reinvention. Merger is often a civilised alternative to bankruptcy, and we live on mainly through our progeny.”

Much more in the full article here.