Blackberry was a few years ago one of the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world, its terminals being used by governments and businessmen from the entire planet. launching iPhone left Blackberry adrift, the Canadian company losing in a few years almost everything it had earned over time, now ending up fighting for survival while continuing to lose money and customers every fiscal quarter.
Why did Blackberry end up in this situation? A book called Losing the Signal tries to explain to us the mistakes that Blackberry made after the launch of the iPhone and which brought the company into the position of fighting to avoid bankruptcy. It all started with the launch of the iPhone, which took most of the smartphone manufacturers by surprise, one of the main advantages of the terminal being the offering of some functions that the operators had forbidden smartphone manufacturers in the past, i.e. a web browser and a app Store.
However, the main problem of the managers of Blackberry, RIM at that time, was that they did not see the iPhone as a direct competitor, considering that the lack of security of the operating system and the physical keyboard does not present a threat to their own products. Reality has shown them that their customer base is actually looking for such functions, most of them leaving behind Blackberry smartphones for iPhone ones.
If the iPhone gained traction, RIM's senior executives believed, it would be with consumers who cared more about YouTube and other Internet escapes than efficiency and security. RIM's core business customers value BlackBerry's secure and efficient communication systems. Offering mobile access to broader Internet content, says Mr. Conlee, "was not a space where we parked our business."
Blackberry believed that iPhones would be "loved" mainly by people who like to watch movies on YouTube and don't care about security, the company's customer base emphasizing security and encrypted communication systems. Again, the people at RIm did not understand exactly what their customers wanted, realizing too late that people no longer want phones with keys, but their efforts to combat the Apple terminal proved to be doomed to failure.
Basically, those at RIM relied on the fact that people don't want new technologies that give them wider access to the Internet and prefer to use old phones with small screens and physical keys, and this brought their end. More details you can read here.
