BlackBerry, industry position, competitors, new products, Digital Revolution, different markets, different demands, innovation, QWERTY keyboard, RIM's market capitalization, Apple, Google, Blackberry models, wireless carriers, United States
The original Blackberry came at a time of great technological innovation, in the early 2000s. Devices were sprawling, from mp3 players to PDAs, wireless phones and even digital cameras. Personal technological devices began to spread into the mainstream, even though wireless phones and pagers were at the time mainly used in the corporate and the business milieu. When we compare it to the current technological landscape, in the late 2010s, what is striking is how many types of devices there were. Nowadays, a basic smartphone can fulfill an incredible number of functions, but we will get to that point in the next question. In the early 2000s, every device had one, or a few particular functions : cameras were used for filming, mp3 players to listen to music, wireless phones to make calls.
[...] The Blackberry devices were thought out for the corporate environment. RIM tried to bring it to the mainstream, but it was too late, and a few bad business decisions surely didn't help. Balsillie and Lazaridis, the co-CEOs of RIM, actually didn't believe the wireless carriers could support the data traffic the iPhone would bring : they thought it would all fail miserably. Not only were they proven wrong, but in 2011, when the downfall of their company was appearing clearly enough so that even they could not deny it, they refused to upgrade to a 4G network and to adapt their devices, because they were, again, unconvinced. [...]
[...] Blackberry was unable to sustain its industry position for several reasons, but a general pattern emerges. The launch of the iPhone is often seen as the start of the downfall of the Blackberry, and rightly so. The iPhone did everything a Blackberry device could do (and more), but with a more user-friendly and easy to use interface, and much more simplicity in general. During the keynote that launched the iPhone in January 2007, Steve Jobs even implicitly taunted RIM's devices by highlighting everything wrong and unpractical with the then-current smartphones, almost making fun of them. [...]
[...] US President Barack Obama owned one, as well as sports athletes. We can assume that, big tech companies having a lot of influence, it was quite natural and logical for their smartphone preference to extend to a more widespread audience. It must however be said that it is easier to take advantage of an existing demand than to have to create it in a mainstream audience (which Apple totally succeeded in doing with the first iPhone), and that's exactly what RIM did : it took advantage of this existing demand. [...]
[...] BlackBerry case study The original Blackberry came at a time of great technological innovation, in the early 2000s. Devices were sprawling, from mp3 players to PDAs, wireless phones and even digital cameras. Personal technological devices began to spread into the mainstream, even though wireless phones and pagers were at the time mainly used in the corporate and the business milieu. When we compare to the current technological landscape, in the late 2010s, what is striking is how many types of devices there were. [...]
[...] They became victim of what Harvard professor Clayton Christensen calls "the innovator's dilemma" : when a once innovative company can't withhold concurrence and fails to reaffirm its dominance, or even just fails. It is true that the Blackberry created the space the iPhone used in order to strive. Therefore, and to end on a more trivial note, we could say that Blackberry products are to smartphones what Kraftwerk is to electronic music : everyone knows why they're important, but no one listens anymore. [...]
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