Why did Blackberry Fail? [Case Study]

When recalling the old BlackBerry Era, the most magnificent and best premium smartphone around the world comes to our mind. Yes, we are all well aware of the popularity and craze of blackberry in the early 2000s. BlackBerry smartphones were considered as the possession for all those symbolizing high-status people, rich and popular professionals. Also, Blackberry promised the complete and strong security of its users' privacy.

By the year 2009-2010, the BlackBerry smartphone gathered more than 85 million users who contributed highly to the success graph of this company. In fact, Blackberry owned over 50% of the US market share as well as 20% of the Global Market share at a single time.

However, by the year 2010, a sudden downfall occurred in the growth of BlackBerry. And soon by 2012, it came down to less than 5% of the market share. So, the question arises, How all of a sudden BlackBerry failed?

This came up to these points:

The Reddit forum/wallstreetbets holds the dependence of the growth to great profit as the technology company is suffering for a long time. Rather of the fact that BlackBerry shares rise from day traders.
Failed to strengthen the innovative features and resulted in being the example for the changes occurring in smartphones.
Other companies are evolving with great fascinating and advanced features, while BlackBerry suffered majorly in offering new features for the convenience of customers.

As the era of advanced technology evolved, Blackberry experienced some major drawbacks which could not be settled. In this article, we'll get brief on how BlackBerry: Leader failed with no other choices. Let's get started!

History of Blackberry
What led to the Failure of BlackBerry
The Final Try by Blackberry
FAQ

History of Blackberry

The company, Blackberry was established in 1984 with the production house for only modems and pagers. However, in 2000, BlackBerry launched its first-ever model of smartphone which was named BlackBerry 957. It's the first model of smartphone that contains the features of surfing on the Internet and sending momentum emails.

In the 2000s, BlackBerry was known as the most standard and premium brand for great business executives and also, those who maintained their privacy and security.

However when the advanced tech company, Apple launched its first smartphone in 2007; BlackBerry experienced good competition in the market. Later, as the technology evolved and other companies like Google launched their phones, the substantial competition began.

With the exponential growth graph of BlackBerry, no one even wondered that this company would fail! But soon after the year 2010, its growth graph experienced a great downfall. And, that's where the end of BlackBerry's era begins.

What led to the Failure of BlackBerry

When BlackBerry reached its peak, it took several non-strategic and unreasonable steps that resulted in some big losses. Likewise, it raised its highest stock with the value of $230 which is now worth $4. BlackBerry, a company with enormous goals and plans, failed due to its raging in no time.

These are some points that led to the failure of BlackBerry.

Hardware Innovation

With the evolving technology, BlackBerry was considered to be overpricing on its average hardware system. Soon as Apple and Samsung launched their smartphones with a complete touch screen body.

Also, after the typing is done, the keyword would disappear giving you a huge space for other purposes. However, BlackBerry with its QWERTY keyboard lacked such features and became a big reason for BlackBerry to fail.

Nonetheless, Blackberry did not invest in making a complete touch screen body, instead, it kept making phones with the outer keyboard such as Blackberry Key 2. That's why its sales dropped by a major number.

Targeting Audience

BlackBerry majorly focused on the richer section such as Celebrities, Businessmen and other rich administrators. They tend to carry BlackBerry showing their superiority. They used Blackberry because:

Powerful end-to-end encryption security
Advanced PDA that majorly helped in their business
Email services

But, soon as iPhone sales increased, Blackberry lost its enormous target audience and importance in just a little period.

Furthermore, BlackBerry only focused on enterprise-level marketing and neglected the consumer portion. This also played a big role in its failure.

Research and Development

BlackBerry did not fail. It lacked innovation and advanced features because it has always been up with technology and supervisions. But the reason why BlackBerry failed is money.

BlackBerry's innovation and features came from Research & Development (R&D). But this required money and due to the decreased sales and other failures, it could not invest its money in the R&D.

That's why BlackBerry could not evolve from its basic potential. Later, BlackBerry's brand was sold by RIM to TCD (a Chinese firm).

Operating System

BlackBerry's operating system lacked some major features and technology. It does not allow the developers to build apps on an abundance scale. Other Operating systems give a free directory for developers to build apps accordingly.

However, Android and iOS allowed the customization of applications as they could be removed and added as per the convenience of users.

Therefore, developers were absolutely happy with Android and iOS. Still, BlackBerry kept on developing its own OS which was a disaster.

The Final Try by Blackberry

BlackBerry ultimately brought new smartphones with demanding features to regain its lost significance and customers. It launched Priv with the features like a dual-curved UHD display, pop-up widgets, 3GB RAM and snapdragon 808 CPU. But, this was too late. The phone was an absolute failure. Its product quality and features lacked some major technology.

BlackBerry did not imply adding new features or advanced OS and because of this, the potential consumers of BlackBerry shifted back to Android and iOS.

FAQ

What caused the downfall of BlackBerry?

The reasons BlackBerry failed is that it didn't adapted new technology, lack of consumer insight and poor design which led to its demise.

When was Blackberry Founded?

Blackberry was founded in 1984.

When did BlackBerry go out of business?

Blackberry in 2016 decided to stop making its own phones, after years of failures.

Conclusion

Today, the production of BlackBerry smartphones has been completely shut down. It has turned back to software and mobile security solutions. BlackBerry succeeded in the market because of its advanced technology and left behind the less-evolved technology. Yet when it came to evolving BlackBerry's technology, it failed because of its incapability to judge and compete with the competition level of the market.

BlackBerry left some major points and examples for other tech companies that to survive in the technology world, you need to keep evolving your features and technology.

Author: Pratyusha Srivastava

Source : https://startuptalky.com/blackberry-case-study/

Date : 2021-05-26T05:30:00.000Z