Consumer market is pretty volatile with products evolving rapidly and changing drastically from their predecessors over a period of time, like the most controversial tech gadget “smartphone”. Smartphones today serve you way differently than they were originally meant to, they were invented just to communicate effectively specifically emails, keep you on schedule their calendars and keep you entertained with Tetris. But today they serve in way too differently with thousands of applications in the appstores. Any guesses which company invented the smartphone? It wasn’t either of Palm or BlackBerry, but it was Nokia, and the irony is the inventor couldn’t keep up in the race of its very own invention! BlackBerry, a small company from Ontario became a big player in the smartphone market just from a patent of two-way paging. Two-way paging; a much prehistoric version of BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) on a paging device with a QWERTY keypad! And recently BlackBerry (then Research In Motion) and Nokia, the two mobile phone Industry giants of the previous decade have finally crashed.
Now let’s get to the ‘Why’ & ‘How’. Nokia first made its ‘navigator’ series phones with a huge screen, data enabled, etc… but it didn’t give much of an importance to smartphones. They believed that mobile phones are just communication devices to make phone calls, miniaturized phone booths! And texting was a Value Added Service, but mobile phones were evolving really fast into smartphones. And that’s where Research In Motion bagged the opportunity. They had a patent of two-way paging along with a few other patents on wireless communication and the business communication industry was badly in need of wireless written communication devices. Then came Palm/O2 devices, but by the time they came in RIM had already gained a good market share and patented new technologies. This was the initial stage of the smartphone and it was just making rounds among the corporates and the consumer market was still miles away. And when you provide mobility solutions to Enterprises you need a lot of supporting software on the Enterprise servers, and RIM was the master of such packages. This brought RIM from being a small Canadian tech company to a multi-billion dollar company on the NYSE. Then Nokia realized the importance of smartphone in the market, but by that time the corporate industry was totally conquered by RIM, so Nokia decided to target the consumer markets, it worked pretty well in the emerging markets even for a lot of other small players in the smartphone industry. Like Sony Ericsson (now Sony) made the first Xperia loaded with Windows operating system and it even had BBM, and this device happened to be the only non-BlackBerry OS device with BBM for over a very long time. The smartphones in the consumer market were now very well designed and feature loaded with QWERTY and touchscreens better cameras, etc… while the ones in the enterprise market were still boring ones with Tetris and a trackpad/trackball, though the camera was pretty much of an important addition to scan documents. The race in both sectors was totally different; the enterprise segment was need and purpose based while the consumer segment was totally a lucrative segment feature based. The enterprise wanted mobility solutions to cut down its communication costs while the consumer wanted everything stuffed inside the phone from multimedia to communication. Palm devices crashed, Ericsson got taken over by Sony, HTC the first to introduce android was now an emerging player. When every other company was giving a sliding QWERTY, HTC decided to give on screen touch keyboards which made it pretty much different from the existing BlackBerries with a small screen to accommodate keyboard and the bulky smartphones that had everything. It made a pocket friendly consumer smartphone.
Now came in the revolutionary iphone from apple Inc. The device that totally redefined smartphone, the device that clubbed need with wants. Well the initial models up to 3GS were total flops and were referred to as stones with touchscreen and speakers. BlackBerry from RIM was still the enterprise preference for mobility solutions, but during this phase a lot of small players in the tech sector started providing mobility solutions and enterprises started introducing BYOD (Bring Your own Device). Along with small mobility service providers and BYOD which saved the saved companies from providing mobile handsets to their employees saving a lot of cost, BlackBerry gradually got kicked out from the enterprise market where data security was not that important, though it still remained intact with the White house, military and other enterprises where data security is a huge concern. BlackBerry had recently jumped into the consumer segment with its BBM as the consumer segment now needed a cheap messaging service. Iphone neither had a good email service nor a messaging service but with the introduction of an appstore open to developers across the internet apple outsourced the task of developing application softwares and it was a huge success. Then came the rise of social media apps and introduction of other social media networks like twitter, instagram, tumblr, etc… and third party data based messaging apps like whatsapp with cross platform compatibility which became a success over the time as android and iOS didn’t have their own messaging services, while the cost of paying an extra premium for BBM and the absence of social media networks gradually led to the fall of RIM in the consumer sector. Did I mention Nokia, the fact is nokia was nowhere amongst all this! It didn’t adopt android or develop any ingenious OS, Symbian crashed. Nokia entered the consumer segment of smartphones but the absence of a good OS proved to be a big turn off. On the other hand the HTC’s hardware problem and weak service network in emerging markets drove away customers and Samsung from nowhere entered the consumer segment with devices for all budgets at competitive prices and rapidly gained market share thus becoming a major player. The open playstore for developers on android OS proved to be a great way of outsourcing applications as for appstore on iOS. So when everyone was making smartphones with applications Nokia and BlackBerry became victims of their own invention “smartphone- phones getting smarter with time”. Nokia didn’t have an OS and by the time it adopted windows OS it was too late, the windows OS didn’t have a good app ecosystem and had already proved to be a failure on HTC. BlackBerry on the other hand made a mistake termed as the “Osborne Effect” in Business Management; announcing something awesome way ahead in the future while and meanwhile giving something good to do with till then. It announced OS 10 while giving OS 7 phones, some of the loyal customers bought OS 7 while the rest decided to wait for OS 10 while most of them got driven away by either Apple or Samsung. BlackBerry sales in both enterprise markets declined with BYOD and cross platform mobility solutions, while in the consumer segment due to lack of features as compared to other smartphones. RIM was still adamant with its need and purpose based features while Samsung wooed consumers with mot of useless features. The plummeting sales also brought down the share prices from $163 to $9 on NASDAQ, the giant had crashed and the word was out.
RIM decided to give one last shot with the launch of OS 10 devices, revamping the company from RIM to BlackBerry Ltd (BBRY) and appointing Alicia Keys as its Creative Director. But again the OS 10 devices were at par with current day smartphones but the app ecosystem was weak, absence of instagram and other social network apps drove away most customers in the consumer segment. While the steep learning curve for the OS also drove away remaining customers. BlackBerry 10 something between need and want, was definitely a good phone for professionals with all its features but people were not aware of what’s there in it. This was because of the absence of direct community co-existence, CrackBerry was a wide spread community but being a third party organization didn’t play an active role to ease out learning curve for a majority of potential customers, while in the case of apple the active involvement of direct community from istores, helped to ease out the learning curve in a better way. BlackBerry spent a lot to get noticed but none to create product awareness. After Z10 it announced the Z30 but the announced being close to that of iphone 5S got shadowed and the product went quite unnoticed for some time. Well the giant finally declared a crash; the company was put on sale but later got rescued with debt funding and currently being overhauled by its new CEO John Chen. It recently announced its new under $200 phone for emerging markets in the Mobile World Congress 2015 shadowed by the Samsung’s flashy Galaxy S5.
Well I hope BlackBerry gets back, but for now I am changing to Galaxy s4…
Savvy Munshi 
Very well summarized post avik.
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