On Blackberry

The new king of tech blog The Verge had a wonderful piece on RIM last week. It was a thoughtful reflection on its past and introduces glimpse into the future of the company made famous by Blackberry phones.

My main take-away from that piece is that Blackberry’s success is attributed to the founder – Mike Lazaridis. His philosophy defined the product and its development over the years. While it is still too early to call RIM a failed company, the declining market share and street credit of Blackberry are also Mike Lazaridis’ fault.

I believe one should look at a product for its own merit, but not how close it (could) resemble the best-in-class product in roughly the same vertical. Along this logic, I think it is unfair to blame Blackberry for not being an iPhone because it is not an iPhone. Its declining market share was due to poor managerial judgment, failing to meet new customer demand. It is not so much about not jumping on the bandwagon of Android or creating an ecosystem around apps. There is always room for prosperity being an alternative products - as long as you are meeting both the need and expectation of your customers. 

Blackberry has done well meeting the needs of its business customers with few significant changes to its operating system and basic features. Its simplicity and keyboards are well-regarded. However, Apple changed  customer expectation in a number of important ways: 


 - touch screen: intuitive control and faster navigation between functions 
 - larger display: making web browsing and infrequent video viewing enjoyable on a cell phone
 - apps, creating a true "ecosystem"
 - "sexy design"


When business people realize that they can type reasonably well on a touch screen and when IT departments at corporations find it easy and secure to sync corporate email on iPhones, Blackberry lost all of its appeal. It is essentially a nice, easy to use device, not the package of experience iPhone and its apps bring to the customers. But RIM still has a second chance, its longer battery life, lower price point, and full keyboards still have tremendous potential in the emerging markets. With a revamped software platform and a better services to its third-party developers, we may see a good comeback some time in 2013.