The cause of RIM’s demise

I predicted Blackberry’s demise about four years ago when my fifteen year old daughter asked for one. The logic was pretty simple: if  my work-related device that helped me be productive in small snippets of time was appealing to a schoolgirl, then something would have to give. And I suspected I was going to be the loser.

Now I loved (past tense) my Blackberry then because everything it did was to help me work. Email, phone and calender synched to my PC, simple document reader, natural keyboard, no distractions.

But then RIM had a bright idea encouraged by greedy shareholders no doubt: let’s pursue the consumer market and turn it into an entertainment device. So they employed software and hardware engineers who understood teenagers and leisure uses of a phone and, with BBM as the mainstay feature started marketing to them instead.

I wondered at the time what would happen to all those great engineers who understood business users and who worked continuously on developing a work-orientated device for them. Because that is where Blackberry’s real value was. But I guess they either got moved away or resources became a lot tighter so RIM took their eye off the work ball to dream instead of a large mass entertainment market.

I know this as about five years ago I got a Macbook. At the time it seemed odd that there was no Blackberry desktop manager for Mac’s so I couldn’t synchronise. And the OS version only came out in 2011 and to this day doens’t work with Entourage. Why not? If I was RIM, I had the opportunity to appeal to both PC and Mac business users especially as Apple didn’t have a phone back then.

But they took the eye off their core market, invested in a larger entertainment led one which they couldn’t ultimately defend against Apple. And because their device now didn’t perform so well for business users (cluttered as it was with games, facebook, music, video) their core customers also defected, unhappy also with the service: remember their global outage problems in 2011?.

This weekend my Blackberry software or hardware failed for the second time this year leaving me without a device on which I depend very heavily. I wonder if this and their server problems last year are indications of a business which simply lost sight of its core market position and in doing so had destroyed its core business. This chart speaks volumes:

For me, I wonder how long I’ll put up with this. But there aren’t many alternatives. I-phones have their fair share of troubles and I don’t want all their functionality. So I’m waiting  for the next great work device  to come along so I can finally ditch this once great brand.

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