Blackberry Analysis

In 2007 one in every three smartphone purchases in US was BB. Worldwide the company (then RIM) was only second to Nokia in the smartphone business, which was only emerging with great steam. BB market share kept growing and peaked in 2009. Then Apple came into smartphone

market and changed the game completely. There were several factors that contributed to this downfall which ultimately changed the market shares completely.

Missing Touch:

The first is simple, but perhaps the most difficult for RIM to overcome: a lack of innovation in an industry that is racing non-stop toward the "latest and greatest." In 2008 Apple introduced the touchscreen feature in a smartphone. The customers still wanted the

connected features, but interacting with other objects through touchscreen was something that he BB never offered at the time. Apple’s Safari web browser was something the smartphone market had never seen before and BB has nothing to offer like that in 2009. Also in 2008

when Apple offered support for third party applications in a smartphone – BB had nothing for their customers to counter it in the smartphone market. It was quite some time that there was an impression in the market that the screen size and lac of virtual key-board in BB

models were contributing to it's dwindling market share. iPhone 4S touting features such as Siri, an "intelligent assistant" application you can literally talk to has pushed the innovation bar pretty high.

Competitors:
Today’s smartphone customers make their buying decisions based on a number of factors. More and more customers are looking for their smartphone to substitute many of their other electronic devices that they used to carry with them (cell phone, pager, watch, camera, video

camera, pedometer, laptop etc.). Initially when Apple launched it's first iPhone in 2007, it took a complete different approach to smartphone development. the iPhone device used 700 mb of memory and two processors. Whereas the contemporary BB used only 32 mb memory and

ran on one processor. The iPhone approach to ramp up the smartphone hardware came at a cost of putting immense pressure on the wireless carrier networks like AT&T as it had had a fully Internet-capable browser with almost no limitation in data usage. In contrast the BB

devices only used a rudimentary browser that limited data usage. The wireless companies had never allowed this to happen before - but Apple's exclusive contract with AT&T changed the game. RIM's decision to market it's product as more efficient and belittle iPhone due to

it's shorter battery life, weak security eventually earned them a reputation of being out of touch. RIM also failed to measure up with it's biggest rival Apple when it failed to capitalize on the opportunity to establish it's own touch screen version of BB. BB's early

models were a big hit with wireless provider Verizon (one of the biggest wireless providers in US). When Apple struck an exclusive deal with AT&T, in 2007 Verizon approached RIM to develop it's own touch screen model in order to compete with the changing smartphone

market and assured RIM to back up their US market launch with a massive campaign. RIM embraced the opportunity and embarked on one of the most complex and ambitious project. In 2008 the product they came up with was BB storm. BB Storm was less than impressive in it's

launch. The technology was not quite ready. The touch screen was awkward to manipulate, as it ran on one processor it was slow and buggy. The customers did not like the BB Storm at all as the sales lagged behind iPhone and the customer retunrs were very high. Ultimately

BB Storm failed to give Verizon Wireless the product that it wanted to compete with Apple and AT&T. So in 2009, Verizon Wireless turned towards Google Inc. (with it's new operating system Android) and Motorola with it's Droid phone at the expense of supporting BB

products. In 2009 Verizon launched a massive campaign to