[greyw0lf01]

The NYT has an interesting piece about Blackberry & Wang Computers. The comment section is especially interesting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/op...-top.html?_r=0

[BergerKing]

How Not to Stay on Top

By*JOE*NOCERA

August 19, 2013

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the dominant computing device used in corporate America was a word processor made by Wang Laboratories. The company’s founder and chief executive was An Wang, a brilliant Chinese immigrant who was widely hailed as a visionary entrepreneur and philanthropist.

At Wang’s peak, some 80 percent of the top 2,000 corporations used the company’s word processors,*according to Bloomberg Businessweek. The company’s rise was so heady that Wang used to keep a chart in his desk that showed when he expected to overtake the mighty I.B.M. — sometime in the mid-1990s.

But then I.B.M. created its first personal computer, and that was the beginning of the end for Want . He and his company stubbornly clung to the notion that the main thing people wanted from their computers was word processing; even after the company realized its error — by which time Wang had foolishly installed his son as chief executive — it always seemed to be a step behind. By 1992,*Wang Laboratories was bankrupt, done in by competitors that understood that people wanted their computers to be more than glorified typewriters.

Twenty-five years after Wang Laboratories dominated with its word processor, a Canadian company then called Research in Motion was the dominant player in its corner of technology: the cellphone and wireless e-mail market. The company, of course, made the BlackBerry. It is a remarkably similar story.

In its heyday, the BlackBerry was so popular that it was nicknamed the CrackBerry. Chief technology officers loved its emphasis on security. Corporate employees loved its compact keyboard, which they mastered with their thumbs.*As recently as 2009, the BlackBerry had about 22 percent of the smartphone market.

Today, of course, the company — which recently changed its name to BlackBerry — is in a heap of trouble. In the most recent quarter, it announced a net loss of $84 million, the latest in a string of bad financial news. In the latest quarter, its share of the global smartphone market had slid to 2.7 percent.*

Its board announced last week*that it was “exploring strategic options,” which usually means it is putting itself on the block. Just like Wang Laboratories — and thousands of other once-dominant companies that stubbornly clung to what they thought they were instead of what they needed to be — the maker of the BlackBerry has become an object lesson in the vagaries of capitalism.

It is not exactly news that it was the introduction of Apple’s iPhone in 2007 — followed by smartphone competitors that used Google’s Android operating system — that turned the BlackBerry from a dominant to a marginal device. But it’s a little more complicated than that.To start with, BlackBerry’s co-chief executives, Mike Lazaridis and James Balsillie, simply didn’t take the iPhone seriously at first — just as An Wang didn’t take the personal computer seriously. After all, the iPhone had a touch screen that made it more difficult to write the kind of long, serious, work-related e-mails that BlackBerry users took for granted. The iPhone was a toy, they thought, and assumed that corporations would never let their employees use them on the job.

More than that, though, “BlackBerry had a huge installed base, and they were afraid to walk away from it,” said Carolina Milanesi, a research vice president with the Gartner Group. This is a problem that often plagues dominant companies. They are so concerned with playing defense — protecting what they have built — that they stand paralyzed as new competitors arise with business models they can’t, or won’t, replicate.

As it turns out, it was true that the iPhone made e-mailing a more cumbersome experience. But it did everything else so much better that it didn’t matter. People were willing to give up some of the ease of e-mail use for everything else iPhones provided. BlackBerry had long thought of itself as a company that provided mobile phone and wireless e-mail service. But Apple gave consumers a sense that they could have something more. In time, the iPhone became a more secure device, and technology officers succumbed to employee desires that they support it. The toy had become a tool.

In recent years, BlackBerry has*introduced phones with touch screens. Itset aside $150 million*to lure developers to write apps for its phones. Its latest phone has gotten some good reviews. But the company has been consistently one step behind its competitors. Although BlackBerry could conceivably stage a comeback, it is still not a good place to be.Was BlackBerry’s fall from grace inevitable? When you look at the history of dominant companies — starting with General Motors — it is easy enough to conclude yes. There are companies that occasionally manage to reinvent themselves. They are nimble and ruthless, willing to disrupt their own business model because they can sense a threat on the horizon.

But they’re the exception.Wang Laboratories is the rule. And so is BlackBerry.

Quoted text of the linked story.

[d3r3k79]

Can't really say i disagree with anything said in the article. Although i am certainly seeing the potential in BB10 and it could arguably be the best smartphone OS, it may be too little to late.
BlackBerry needs to completely re-market their brand name so that their brand not synonymous with failure.

[greyw0lf01]

BlackBerry needs to completely re-market their brand name so that their brand not synonymous with failure.

On that note, it might not be a terrible idea to have Blackberry launch the a30 phone under a completely seperate name... make a clean break.

[lnichols]

Can't disagree with the analysis. BlackBerry was and still is arrogant. They need to be more humble now, nimble, and realize that the name BlackBerry is not desirable.

[Jakob Greve]

As mentioned so many times earlier BlackBerry were on top of the game as late as march 2011. Not that it's not an age ago, but just pointing out that folks and journalist like to rewrite history for drama... Like along came Apple and bam from 2007...

[szlevi]

As mentioned so many times earlier BlackBerry were on top of the game as late as march 2011. Not that it's not an age ago, but just pointing out that folks and journalist like to rewrite history for drama... Like along came Apple and bam from 2007...

They were nowhere near to the top of any "game" in 2011 as they were already behind Nokia in 2010... I don't know where this urban legend comes from but I suspect pure marketing BS, nothing else.
They are shedding market share at an accelerated pace at least since 2008 - by 2011 they were already in the middle of the list: Gartner Says Worldwide Smartphone Sales Soared in Fourth Quarter of 2011 With 47 Percent Growth

[Geeoff]

The NYT has an interesting piece about Blackberry & Wang Computers. The comment section is especially interesting:

I agree about the comments on the article. High quality opinions!

[Rickroller]

Can't disagree with the analysis. BlackBerry was and still is arrogant. They need to be more humble now, nimble, and realize that the name BlackBerry is not desirable.

Good thing they never went and completely changed their name from RIM then..

Oh wait..

Sent from my gesture controlled Nexus 4

[Caymancroc]

Can't really say i disagree with anything said in the article. Although i am certainly seeing the potential in BB10 and it could arguably be the best smartphone OS, it may be too little to late.
BlackBerry needs to completely re-market their brand name so that their brand not synonymous with failure.

They are too late on re-marketing their brand name too.

[Caymancroc]

They need to be more humble now, nimble, and realize that the name BlackBerry is not desirable.

They are also too late on all of this. LOL!

I can't believe how this company has the audacity not to have a 90 day phone support to keep up with Apple. Heck they should offer a year right now to one up everyone. Anything to get customers back.

[Taigatrommel]

Decent article, without much I could argue about. IMO the end of it is a bit too hammered in stone. BlackBerry is not really dead yet, but they seem to do still too little to actually catch up again. Yes they created a new OS, delivered pretty decent devices and tried to reinvent themselves - stuff which is not an easy task. However especially in terms of rebranding, reinventing, marketing and pricing they haven't done enough. Especially in rebranding and marketing, majority of media and people out there still talk about the old "Curve" or "OS5" BlackBerry when talking/writing about this company. BBRY still didn't manage to get the word out loud enough that things changed.
But they still have some time left to get this done.

Also the Times talks a lot about Apple and the iPhone, and of course about Wang. Yet they failed to mention it was Apple, which was also on the very edge of becoming bankcrupt and irrelevant, making a big comeback and reinvented themselves. It is also widely known nobody took the iPhone seriously. Besides BlackBerry, it has been Microsoft with their Windows Mobile plattform and basicly Nokia with Symbian and their Communicator line, who "loughed" about the toy Apple created there. Smartphones aren't a new things, it is a market which exists since the very early 2000s or even late 90s and those three companies were the creators and leading plattforms of this market. Look at all of them. Nokia was undecided whether to go with Symbian or Maemo, created devices with decent hardware and good designs, yet they flawed in terms of software and memory.
Microsoft kept on their old strategies, even with Windows Mobile 6.5, failing to deliver Windows Phone 7 in time and in the right way. Basicly like BBRY, who stuck with their Java OS too long and failed to realize the former small, niche, smartphone market grew at high-speed and it was the iPhone and Google, who realized they could jump in the gap the big three created, now defining and dominating this market.

Look at Nokia now, massive sales of invenory and factories, massive job-cuts, critical financial situation. Microsoft is left virtually unimportant in smartphone business and we all know where BlackBerry stands today.

Posted via the awesome Blackberry Q10

[mania626]

V

Posted via CB10

[Wiki Cydia]

Also the Times talks a lot about Apple and the iPhone, and of course about Wang. Yet they failed to mention it was Apple, which was also on the very edge of becoming bankcrupt and irrelevant, making a big comeback and reinvented themselves. It is also widely known nobody took the iPhone seriously. Besides BlackBerry, it has been Microsoft with their Windows Mobile plattform and basicly Nokia with Symbian and their Communicator line, who "loughed" about the toy Apple created there.

The article didn't "fail" to mention Apple's nadir. Rather, Apple's strategy was different. Its comeback was not built upon reclaiming control of the existing PC market; instead, it entered new ones. BB tried a new market a couple years go, but it didn't go so well.

Also, Microsoft isn't really comparable either. Microsoft is still the leader in PC operating systems, and thus poor mobile performance does not mean poor company performance. Neither BBRY not Wang can make the same claim, which is why Wang went bankrupt and BBRY is examining "strategic alternatives."

[CHIP72]

If Blackberry had launched the exact same BB10 devices in the fall of 2010 rather than the spring of 2013 (and avoided the lack of an e-mail client on the PlayBook debacle, which IMO had a serious, negative effect on Blackberry's reputation), I think the smartphone sector would be a different story right now. Blackberry probably wouldn't have been the leading player, but they would have been a significant player (probably at least 15-20% market share) IMO. (They still would have had the problem of too high of RAM requirements restricting their ability to lower their unit production costs, which would have hurt them in many "emerging economy" countries, but I think they would have been in solid shape in high GDP per capita countries.)