Bye bye Blackberry
OPINION
By KELVIN DAVIS
(Kelvin Davis is the director or Greymouse, a cloud service-provider that supplies high quality, time-bound and cost-efficient services through its own facility in Fiji.)
It’s getting hard again to be a true and loyal believer of BlackBerry.
According to latest sales figures released by BlackBerry, its share price dropped nearly 28 per cent after having reported a shocking $84 million loss.
This has happened despite the introduction of a new line of BlackBerry phones about a year ago as confirmed by BlackBerry president and chief executive Thornstein Heins.
http://tinyurl.com/nytimes-blackberry-posts-loss.
The new slick era
Having once been such a dominant force in smart phone sales, with a share of 55.3 per cent of the United States market in 2009, Black Berry must now make way for the new slick era.
Apple’s iPhone with touch screen interactions and downloadable applications have now eroded BlackBerry’s market sales share at 0.9 per cent as confirmed by a Kantar Worldpanel Com Tech Survey.
Major changing factors
It’s not all about just making a good phone because there are, in reality many other important influencing factors that also contribute to the change of sales dominance:
- Competition in the brutal handset market requires a good product to not only have a tight control over the supply chain; it must also have a powerful marketing strategy. http://tinyurl.com/nytimes-best-selling-not-good
- Branding – how a consumer perceives the company also carries a lot of weight as Apple and Samsung both are dominant in brand recognitions, whilst a company like HTC is hardly spoken about in the United States.
- Customer satisfaction – consumer tastes changes quickly and it actually carries weight in as far as sales figures goes, which has exactly been the case for a survey released by Research In Motion.
It showed that on a scale of up to 100, RIM’s aggregate satisfaction score is 69, where as in contrast Apple, being the cell phone index leader scored 83. http://tinyurl.com/nytimes-consumers-less-happy
Reasons for switch over
1. Washington-based government agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has also joined the large crop of businesses and organisations that have dropped the BlackBerry.
The agency has explained that RIM’s software which is designed to manage and protect data on BlackBerry’s device was way too expensive.
http://tinyurl.com/nytimes-noaa-iphone
2. Consumer’s fast changing tastes – basically in a market that is brutal in competition globally, a major factor that needs exclusive attention is designing and updating a products capability to suit changing consumer tastes.
Unfortunately, RIM must now play a catch up game to its rivals because it failed to acknowledge the importance of “changing its products and services to enhance the constantly evolving information technology market place”.
http://tinyurl.com/bgr-decline-wsj-profile
3. While travelling around the European region, I personally spoke to four Blackberry owners. It is interesting to note that Blackberry is much more visible in Europe than the Asia Pacific region.
I asked each person about their email managements and interestingly enough, they all pulled out their iPhones showing that they all used this for emails.
The reason was that their companies insisted on the use of BlackBerry’s for business phone calls and business emails only. For this reason they carry two phones.
Gales of creative destruction
Five years ago, the Blackberry became a synonymously generic smart phone, well on its way to becoming an iconic trade mark, yet facts now confirm a totally different story.
In today’s rapidly-evolving technology world, it is basically the companies that fails to innovate rapidly enough that will become victims to the strong gales of the creative destruction that are “blowing” even harder than ever in today’s constant changing technological economy.
And this fact is nowhere truer and more dominant than in the mobile phone handset and operating market system which has itself undergone rapid evolving changes over the past 15 years.
http://tinyurl.com/forbes-bye-blackberry-last
The power with which new platforms displace incumbent mobile vendor’s fortunes is indeed worth noticing as it continues to surprise and sadly in the case of RIM, a cruel shock.
In a marketplace which is just so dynamic, the valuable question to ask is just how long will it actually be before Apple and Google’s Android meets a similar fate?