IT Business Failure Paper: What Happened to BlackBerry? Apple changed the entire market and its game when it released its first touchscreen smartphone in 2007. With the introduction of touchscreen, web browsing, and app features, consumers worldwide were sucked into the world of Apple and its devices. Nowadays, it seems that Apple iPhones and Samsung Galaxies have taken over the smartphone industry. Instead of competing with these two dominating phones, other phones, BlackBerry for example, seem to have just disappeared or is on their fast track to extinction. So what happened to BlackBerry? BlackBerry had a successful run in the beginning when they saw a significant value in the numeric pagers. In 1999, BlackBerry introduced a two-way pager that allowed people to send and read data over the internet which became the basis for the messaging services. Blackberry continued to grow and it wasn’t until long when BlackBerry was among the top of its industry, where more than 1 of every 3 new smartphones purchased was a BlackBerry (Tofel, 2014). The game changed drastically when Apple introduced their first smartphone iPhone Generation I in 2007. It was revolutionary. Apple has renovated the idea of cellphones to mobile platform smartphones that used one OS on devices and applications for consistency. While everyone around the world exclaimed at the revolutionary changes that Apple brought, BlackBerry simply did not. Co-CEO, Jim Balsille, said, “The recent launch of Apple’s iPhone does not pose a threat to Research In Motion Ltd.’s consumer-geared BlackBerry Pearl and simply marks the entry of yet another competitor into the smartphone market.” (Tofel, 2013). To the BlackBerry’s two CEO’s, Apple was just another fad and they believed that there was no way that people would choose iPhones over their tight security system and their keyboard equipped phones. Apple had changed the phones “corporate devices” to “everyday user friendly devices,” which is why it was easy for BlackBerry to ignore the competition since they were focusing on enterprise consumers (Ram, 2012). Eidler explains that BlackBerry’s outdated traditional views were just not enough to stop customers from leaving en masse (Eidler, 2011). BlackBerry finally tried to come out with their modern smartphones, but due to their outdated operating system, its first touchscreen phone “Storm” was a failure. In order to improve their system so it can compete with Android and iOS at its full efficiency, BlackBerry took the time to renovate their phone and introduced BlackBerry 10 in 2013. Unfortunately for BlackBerry, their new improvements were not up to the consumers’ expectations and still did not meet up to the great iOS or Android systems. Technology is changing at such a rapid pace and BlackBerry was just slow at acknowledging and adapting to the new market. “BlackBerry maker RIM failed to evolve at anywhere near the speed required in the post-iPhone area, and stopped making good devices” (McCracken, 2013). Miller’s article expresses that BlackBerry’s stubbornness to adapt, poor marketing, failed leadership, and success from competitors all constitute as reasons why they failed (Miller, 2013). A company, especially involved in a fast-paced changing industry, should never overlook or dismiss the values and the ideas of another emerging company. The two main competitors in the smartphone industry are now Apple and Samsung because they saw the value in each other’s products and incorporated the new concepts into their own devices, which is what was lacking from BlackBerry.
Ignoring Apple and their ideology was the biggest mistake made by their leadership that eventually led to a fast downfall of the company. BlackBerry’s failure could have been