Why BlackBerry market share is so low [Opinion]

to all, I want to share my analysis about BlackBerry position in the phone market.

First I want to apologise for my English that is not so good.
Today, smartphone market is today very open and can touch a lot of people, far more than 10 years ago.
IOS is at a strong position due to marketing and because, I have to agree, IPhone's are very good. So, a lot of people want it for the design, and developers understand it, so they work a lot to develop tons of useless application. Second point, we can find plenty of accessories. Lot of them are very useful for listening music from the iPhone and charging it together. There isn't any other phone for witch you can find so many accessories. This is so helpful when you have a smartphone to be able to get this kind of adds. So, in my opinion, IOS means simple, applications and accessories.

The android smartphone's are not so good, but they are ship. So people that don't have the budget for Iphone will always find android one to buy. The number of application is also huge and you can find lot of it for free. So people try android and continue to buy some because they know how it work and can do what they need to with it. You can have one and personalize it as you want, so one can think that he have a special smartphone due to that point. So, Android mean shipper and personalisation.

Now for the blackberry... I really think that people who like blackberry are professional and don't need tons of application. We need something special and useful. But, with this lake of applications, blackberry is not able to compete with android or IOS for who want funny or useless applications. The smartphone market is growing up and blackberry users don't follow the market, so at the end market share is decreasing and lot of people leave to find accessories or applications. So Blackberry means quality and professional.

After that, how to compete with other brands ? One of the good way is coming with 10.3 and android application support. But not enough. Blackberry have to, if they want to increase market share, sold shipper phones. Z3 is a good way when 10.3 will be on it. But don't forget the past. Plenty of young people buy blackberry phone as the curve one because of BBM and the low price. Marketing is missing also, so react.

I don't want to see blackberry at more than 10 % of the market, I like to feel that in the plane, or wherever you want, I am the only one that have THE last blackberry phone. But I just hope that I will be able to chose a new one every year for years.

what's about windows phones ? cheaper but not good enough to continue to grow.

So this is my thinking and I thank you to read it, and ready to share with you.

There is also the thinking... who buys a BlackBerry these days. So the brand name sounds obsolete and people think that the brand is too old. Me... I remain a BlackBerry fan...

Posted via CB10

BlackBerry always for me, and I own 2 Z30s.

From my ? phone.

Originally Posted by piquepoc

Now for the blackberry... I really think that people who like blackberry are professional and don't need tons of application. We need something special and useful. But, with this lake of applications, blackberry is not able to compete with android or IOS for who want funny or useless applications. The smartphone market is growing up and blackberry users don't follow the market, so at the end market share is decreasing and lot of people leave to find accessories or applications. So Blackberry means quality and professional.

Well which is is? You say that Blackberry users don't want a bunch of fun and useless apps but that BlackBerry needs more apps to be competitive. If BlackBerry users don't need apps then why do people want them?

And take a look at the apps available for BlackBerry. There are far more junk apps than useful ones that flood the app store.

Originally Posted by donnation

And take a look at the apps available for BlackBerry. There are far more junk apps than useful ones that flood the app store.

Is the BlackBerry app store still such that one guy publishes like 40% of the apps there?

Originally Posted by Roo Zilla

Is the BlackBerry app store still such that one guy publishes like 40% of the apps there?

I don't know if it's 40% anymore since the app store gas green, but it's still a ton. But that's onlyba portion of the junk games that are in it.

Well to take a swing at your question,there are a number of serious factors which have dictates the lack of market share of BlackBerry:
1. BlackBerry missed the all touch train when Apple released their iPhone and Google their droids.
2. BlackBerry shifted focus to catch market share amongst a focus group which was never their primary sales market, namely Mr/Ms Joe Public.
3. BlackBerry sought to address this fledging market share upkeep by releasing albeit very late, a string of lower tier devices which sold at premium price (given BlackBerry's over heads as they sought to control full production), the uptake slowed, only showing market share of any significance in the developing countries.
4. Lack of marketing blitz. Apple presented a well polished product which with the use of key marketing techniques produced an awe factor which up this day hasn't waned.
5. Losing focus meant losing clients. BES has been one of their saving graces, but the hole in the market was plugged by Android and iOS.

That's a rough take on why. There maybe more complex issues at stake including poor management ,bad decisions and failure to raise BlackBerry's head. Until now. Recent acquisitions, new polished products, and a CEO John Chen who along with his team have been making strides to restore confidence and woo clients back into the fold. September 24/26 will be key dates in BlackBerry's history. Cheers !

Posted via CrackBerry App

Originally Posted by donnation

Well which is is? You say that Blackberry users don't want a bunch of fun and useless apps but that BlackBerry needs more apps to be competitive. If BlackBerry users don't need apps then why do people want them?

And take a look at the apps available for BlackBerry. There are far more junk apps than useful ones that flood the app store.

My thinking about this point is to touch more people. If you need to increase market share, you have to touch young people, the one who like applications and don't have money to spend. After that, if they are satisfied by the brand, they will follow it.

Blue787, I agree with all your points, and the first one is the main. But I think it's not to late.
But to recover the late you have to be more proactive in marketing and communication

Originally Posted by piquepoc

to all, I want to share my analysis about BlackBerry position in the phone market.

First I want to apologise for my English that is not so good.
Today, smartphone market is today very open and can touch a lot of people, far more than 10 years ago.
IOS is at a strong position due to marketing and because, I have to agree, IPhone's are very good. So, a lot of people want it for the design, and developers understand it, so they work a lot to develop tons of useless application. Second point, we can find plenty of accessories. Lot of them are very useful for listening music from the iPhone and charging it together. There isn't any other phone for witch you can find so many accessories. This is so helpful when you have a smartphone to be able to get this kind of adds. So, in my opinion, IOS means simple, applications and accessories.

The android smartphone's are not so good, but they are ship. So people that don't have the budget for Iphone will always find android one to buy. The number of application is also huge and you can find lot of it for free. So people try android and continue to buy some because they know how it work and can do what they need to with it. You can have one and personalize it as you want, so one can think that he have a special smartphone due to that point. So, Android mean shipper and personalisation.

Now for the blackberry... I really think that people who like blackberry are professional and don't need tons of application. We need something special and useful. But, with this lake of applications, blackberry is not able to compete with android or IOS for who want funny or useless applications. The smartphone market is growing up and blackberry users don't follow the market, so at the end market share is decreasing and lot of people leave to find accessories or applications. So Blackberry means quality and professional.

After that, how to compete with other brands ? One of the good way is coming with 10.3 and android application support. But not enough. Blackberry have to, if they want to increase market share, sold shipper phones. Z3 is a good way when 10.3 will be on it. But don't forget the past. Plenty of young people buy blackberry phone as the curve one because of BBM and the low price. Marketing is missing also, so react.

I don't want to see blackberry at more than 10 % of the market, I like to feel that in the plane, or wherever you want, I am the only one that have THE last blackberry phone. But I just hope that I will be able to chose a new one every year for years.

what's about windows phones ? cheaper but not good enough to continue to grow.

So this is my thinking and I thank you to read it, and ready to share with you.

I think Whats app has done enough damage to BBM and BlackBerry
Earlier young guys n girls used to chat on low cost curve BlackBerry, and it was a cool thing.

Now Whats app has taken that position and many other apps. Which has dented BBM.

BlackBerry needs to realize that, regardless of how productive one can be with OS 10, people want smartphones that can be a part of both their work and personal lives. For BlackBerry that means offering larger touch handsets and better apps. I can type longer, faster and more accurately with my Q10 than with any other smartphone but its 3" screen makes it very difficult for me to do research, watch a video or read a book. Because it has a larger screen, the Z10 is more usable but its battery life is relatively poor. The Z30 has a larger screen and excellent battery life but AT&T does not offer that handset. I want a new smartphone but I have decided that the Passport is not for me. And, having a Q10, the Classic is not a compelling upgrade. I have given consideration to purchasing a Z30 STL100-5 from the BlackBerry store but the idea of spending $500 on a phone that was introduced a year ago and foregoing LTE with AT&T is not appealing. In addition to my laptop, I use daily a BlackBerry (alternating between the Q10 or the Z10) and an iPad mini with Retina display and cellular connectivity. At this time I am seriously considering substituting my BlackBerry devices and the iPad mini for an iPhone 6 Plus. Carrying only one device for both work and play can make for a simpler life.

Originally Posted by netnative

BlackBerry needs to realize that, regardless of how productive one can be with OS 10, people want smartphones that can be a part of both their work and personal lives. For BlackBerry that means offering larger touch handsets and better apps. I can type longer, faster and more accurately with my Q10 than with any other smartphone but its 3" screen makes it very difficult for me to do research, watch a video or read a book. Because it has a larger screen, the Z10 is more usable but its battery life is relatively poor. The Z30 has a larger screen and excellent battery life but AT&T does not offer that handset. I want a new smartphone but I have decided that the Passport is not for me. And, having a Q10, the Classic is not a compelling upgrade. I have given consideration to purchasing a Z30 STL100-5 from the BlackBerry store but the idea of spending $500 on a phone that was introduced a year ago and foregoing LTE with AT&T is not appealing. In addition to my laptop, I use daily a BlackBerry (alternating between the Q10 or the Z10) and an iPad mini with Retina display and cellular connectivity. At this time I am seriously considering substituting my BlackBerry devices and the iPad mini for an iPhone 6 Plus. Carrying only one device for both work and play can make for a simpler life.

Any reason for "Passport is not for me"?
It has the keyboard and the screen size.

I'd like to know, because I own a Q10 and Z10 as well.

OK, the iPhone has the apps and could replace the iPad (if you're not using MS Office, or are happy with the feature limitations on the phone).





? BlackBerry? I premdict the future's gonna be chenomenal! ?

It's so low because; a - they got complacent and fell behind and are now catching up; b - have realised the consumer space is dominated by the big boys google and apple; and c - refocusing takes time. BlackBerry is rebuilding and that doesn't happen overnight. But I'd say they've turned the corner into profitability.

Posted via CB10

All BlackBerry devices should be dark purple.

Posted via CB10

Originally Posted by Prem WatsApp

Any reason for "Passport is not for me"?
It has the keyboard and the screen size. I'd like to know, because I own a Q10 and Z10 as well.

I have seen videos and pictures and cannot see myself carrying and holding a phone with those dimensions. Also, while a square display may suitable for attorneys to work on documents or for radiologists to interpret x-rays, it does not lend itself very well to watch movies.

Originally Posted by Prem WatsApp

OK, the iPhone has the apps and could replace the iPad (if you're not using MS Office, or are happy with the feature limitations on the phone).

You bring a good point that I had overlooked: Office 365 apps are available only for the iPad. What feature limitations were you thinking of?

On the contrary, the name BlackBerry sounds way classier than any other manufacturer's name over heard.

Posted via CrackBerry App

To understand why BB's marketshare is so low you have to understand what made them great. Their ascension in my opinion was more culture than it was product.

RIM started the blackberry concept by viewing it as mobile productivity infrastructure. Allowing professionals to take their office with them on the road without disconnecting themselves from their environments. Back then, like today, Blackberry was a niche product. So it started popping up in the hands of professionals and quickly was associated with affluent individuals. All the CEO's had one. Even the president of the U.S had one.

Expensive gadgets fascinate us all, so Blackberry started capturing the youth markets as well. Now the kids in high-school and university started buying blackberries so they can be at the forefront of mobile communications. It was "cool" to own one, it made you look important. The coolness establishes the culture which in turn drives sales. This rocketed BB to the top of the consumer market as well as the enterprise market.

Along comes Apple with a new definition of what was cool. All of a sudden mobile Email was secondary. Email in the last 5 years...is just too slow a communication medium. This is what the social networks also capitalized on. The coolness was to make your device the center of your world and have instant access to multimedia content and games. Apple re-wrote the mobile culture as a result. Now there is this new cool gadget that lets you take your PC and entire music collection with you anywhere you go! Who cares about work or Email?

It was different, it was expensive and associated instantly with a status symbol because of the already popular ipod brand. Other companies jumped on board with their versions of smartphones, which could not compete with Apple. In Google's brilliance, they theorized that why should all these phone companies spend millions making OS's? Google will make a generic OS, make it global, and let every company license it from them. Win-win. This established Google Android as the only ecosystem competitor to Apple, because now all the world's smartphones outside of Apple, were run on one OS. Instant ecosystem..the world starts developing Android into a giant!

Blackberry's collapse was cataclysmic! They didn't respond to the market shift because of arrogance, believing that mobile Email still drove this industry. As I said this is about culture, not about function. Apple owns the culture, they own the branding and as long as having expensive i-phones is seen as cool by the various demographics, Apple will continue to dominate even if their product is crappy!

Blackberry's primary advantage today is that the iPhone market is over-saturated. You're not different or cool if you own one, cause everybody else owns one alongside you. Some people just like to be different. For Blackberry to be great again, they need to shift the culture of mobile by bringing things to the table that the world has never seen before. Otherwise they will always be a niche company trailing Apple and Android. Apple owns the culture, so they have the power to shift it in any direction they want. Blackberry is paddling against the tide.

My $0.02

Originally Posted by A_Aviator_A

To understand why BB's marketshare is so low you have to understand what made them great. Their ascension in my opinion was more culture than it was product.

______SNIP

Apple owns the culture, so they have the power to shift it in any direction they want. Blackberry is paddling against the tide.

My $0.02

I agree with some of your points, but I think the fall of BlackBerry isn't for the reasons you give.

Basically, in the past 5-6 years, communications priority has changed drastically. Look back 10 years ago, what was the most important form of mobile communications? It was the phone call. BlackBerry changed some of that with instant email and BBM. All of a sudden, email was seen as a legitimate form of mobile communications, because you could get it immediately. The great thing about email is that it's ubiquitous. Everybody has it. If you have a BlackBerry, you got it everywhere you were, and it was immediate. For work that depended on email as a major form of communications, it was indispensable. That's what lead to BlackBerry's spectacular rise.

What lead to BlackBerry's fall wasn't just the iPhone. It was people change in communications habits. For a long time, email was 2nd to only to phone calls. That probably started to change about 5 years ago. Now, texting (or texting alternatives) is probably a more dominant form of communication than even the phone call. I can say this... .In 2009 or so, I used to run up 2000-3000 minutes a month in phone calls. This year, I haven't passed 800 minutes yet. I don't think I'm alone in this. People don't call anymore. They just text. Emails suffered the same fate. Certainly there are groups out there for whom email is just as important in 2014 as it was in 2006, but that's not the case with everyone. I used to get dozens of work related emails a day, some times as many as 200. Now.... it's usually less than 10 if you ignore all the spam emails from places I bought stuff from.

So where does BlackBerry fit into all this? It doesn't. What are BlackBerry's strengths? It's phone calls and emails. BBM is nice, but it's not ubiquitous like phone numbers and email addresses. Once the communication paradigm began to shift in favor of texting, BlackBerry was left at the door without a competing product. Why did Facebook buy Whatsapp for $19B? Maybe they paid too much... People said the same thing when Google paid $1B for Youtube because they were getting sued by everybody and nobody was going to watch homemade videos..... Video viewing paradigm changed. It's now all about streaming and time shifting, or else you would still be going to your neighborhood Blockbuster to rent a video on Friday night.

Originally Posted by A_Aviator_A

To understand why BB's marketshare is so low you have to understand what made them great. Their ascension in my opinion was more culture than it was product.

RIM started the blackberry concept by viewing it as mobile productivity infrastructure. Allowing professionals to take their office with them on the road without disconnecting themselves from their environments. Back then, like today, Blackberry was a niche product. So it started popping up in the hands of professionals and quickly was associated with affluent individuals. All the CEO's had one. Even the president of the U.S had one.

Expensive gadgets fascinate us all, so Blackberry started capturing the youth markets as well. Now the kids in high-school and university started buying blackberries so they can be at the forefront of mobile communications. It was "cool" to own one, it made you look important. The coolness establishes the culture which in turn drives sales. This rocketed BB to the top of the consumer market as well as the enterprise market.

Along comes Apple with a new definition of what was cool. All of a sudden mobile Email was secondary. Email in the last 5 years...is just too slow a communication medium. This is what the social networks also capitalized on. The coolness was to make your device the center of your world and have instant access to multimedia content and games. Apple re-wrote the mobile culture as a result. Now there is this new cool gadget that lets you take your PC and entire music collection with you anywhere you go! Who cares about work or Email?

It was different, it was expensive and associated instantly with a status symbol because of the already popular ipod brand. Other companies jumped on board with their versions of smartphones, which could not compete with Apple. In Google's brilliance, they theorized that why should all these phone companies spend millions making OS's? Google will make a generic OS, make it global, and let every company license it from them. Win-win. This established Google Android as the only ecosystem competitor to Apple, because now all the world's smartphones outside of Apple, were run on one OS. Instant ecosystem..the world starts developing Android into a giant!

Blackberry's collapse was cataclysmic! They didn't respond to the market shift because of arrogance, believing that mobile Email still drove this industry. As I said this is about culture, not about function. Apple owns the culture, they own the branding and as long as having expensive i-phones is seen as cool by the various demographics, Apple will continue to dominate even if their product is crappy!

Blackberry's primary advantage today is that the iPhone market is over-saturated. You're not different or cool if you own one, cause everybody else owns one alongside you. Some people just like to be different. For Blackberry to be great again, they need to shift the culture of mobile by bringing things to the table that the world has never seen before. Otherwise they will always be a niche company trailing Apple and Android. Apple owns the culture, so they have the power to shift it in any direction they want. Blackberry is paddling against the tide.

My $0.02

Excellent view