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It was the best of smartphones. It was the worst of companies.
Before the iPhone debuted in 2007, the BlackBerry had become the
smartphone of choice for businesses because it was designed especially
for email - and its network was secure, separate from the Internet.
It was never the dominant smartphone brand or operating system.
Symbian holds the distinction of most
popular smartphone OS, and from 2007 through 2010, it dominated the
smartphone landscape. In 2007, Windows Mobile held the #2 spot,
followed by BlackBerry just slightly ahead of Linux - and the iPhone a
distant 5th. In 2008, BlackBerry doubled sales to take the #2 spot from
Microsoft, a position it retained in 2009 as well.
Android took the #2 spot in 2010, followed by BlackBerry and then
the iPhone.
But in 2011, Android displaced Symbian as the most popular
smartphone operating system, with Apple's iPhone holding third place at
18% and RIM dropping to just 12%.
Two big changes took place in 2011. First, Nokia announced in
February that it would switch from its Symbian operating system to
Windows 7, which could catapult Windows to the #2 spot - or alienate a
lot of Symbian users. Second, there was the
Great BlackBerry Outage of 2011. For 3-4 days, BlackBerry users
were unable to access email due to a "failure in RIM's infrastructure",
which is separate from the Internet everyone else uses.
In addition, RIM made some very bad moves in 2011, such as releasing
its PlayBook tablet with absolutely no support for email unless it was
tethered to a BlackBerry smartphone. (They did address this with an
operating system upgrade earlier this year.) This past week, its
co-CEOs resigned, and there are rumors that RIM is trying to find a
white knight to swoop in and rescue the company.
If you followed Apple in 1996, a lot of this should sound familiar.
Starting in 1995, Apple had attempted to grow the Mac market by
licensing the Mac OS and authorizing
Macintosh clones, a move that ended up eating into the most
profitable part of the Macintosh product line. Although Apple sold 4.5
million Macs in 1995, it dropped to 4 million in 1996 and 2.8 million
in 1997 - the year Steve Jobs pulled the plug on authorized clones.
The term beleaguered was widely applied to Apple, and prior
to Steve Jobs' return at the end of 1986, the big question was whether
Apple would close its doors or be bought out by
Sony or IBM or
Sun Microsystems or
Oracle or Motorola.
Instead of that happening, Apple made a $400 million gamble on NeXT,
bringing Steve Jobs back to the company he helped found, and the rest
is history. Jobs eliminated unprofitable products, streamlined the
Macintosh product line, slowly growing Mac sales and turning the
company from quarterly losses to profits.
The big change is that Jobs turned the focus from market share and
competitive pricing to building a superior user experience, even if
that cost a bit more. And that's what kept Apple alive, selling product
at the highest margin in the PC industry and totally dominating the
market for computers priced at $1,000 and higher.
If RIM is going to survive without being acquired, it needs to
follow Apple's example and go back to creating the best possible
experience for its users. No more outages. No more smartphones that
don't work like they expect. Do not eliminate the keyboard for
touchscreen - keep it going on at least one or two models. No more
following the market, but learning to lead it again.
Can new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins pull it off? Is he any kind of
visionary at all? Or will he watch helplessly as RIM become the next
tech failure?
With its history and installed base, there's no reason RIM has to
disappear, but some poor decisions and poor communication coupled with
customer panic could easily sink the company.
Dan Knight has been using Macs since 1986,
sold Macs for several years, supported them for many more years, and
has been publishing Low End Mac since April 1997. If you find Dan's articles helpful, please consider making a donation to his tip jar.
Links for the Day
Mac of the Day: Performa 630, introduced 1994.07.01. The first desktop Mac with an IDE hard drive could accept a TV or radio tuner.
