RIM – Research in Motion External Environment Overview Going back 10 years ago, RIM actually used to have a far larger share of the smart phone market (roughly 40%) starting from the latter half of the 1990s till 2005. It was only when other manufacturers (i.e. Nokia, Samsung, Siemens, and Motorola) gained sufficient traction that smart phone sales for the company began to dip (Castald, 2012). The proverbial nail in the coffin came when Apple released the iPhone, from 2009 till the present the iPhone dominated the smart phone market pushing other competitors, especially RIM, onto the sidelines (Castald, 2012). While RIM has attempted to compensate for this by venturing into other markets and attempting to diversify its service offerings, the fact remains that the company should have delved deeper into appropriate product development early on instead of relying on its old business model. As a result, RIM’s shares have been falling in price as of late with many speculating that this once great company may actually go under (Castald, 2012). Internal Environment Overview When examining the main reason behind why RIM was unable to sustain its market share despite its earlier significant lead, various experts agree that it was connected to the fact that RIM’s business model was obsolete and the way in which it chose to market itself was all wrong when compared to the rise of the iPhone (Castald, 2012). First and foremost, what you have to understand is that the marketing campaign of RIM centered almost entirely on the Blackberry being a phone for people in the fast paced world of business and international trade. While this was an effective campaign during the height of its popularity, the company neglected to become a more widespread entity that catered to more than just one particular niche. Furthermore, Blackberries lacked a certain degree of innovation in the way in which they provided value to customers (Castald, 2012). Yes, they released models which were smaller, faster and had higher memory capacities; however, they still had little innovative programming architecture and basically were just releasing the same phone over and over again and were repackaging it as being better on the basis of sleeker designs and increased memory capacities. This differs significantly from the way in which the iPhone was developed wherein each new iteration had a unique feature which was further enhanced by the various Apps a customer could download from the Apple App store. Competitive Advantage The main consumer segment that RIM originally targeted were consumers involved in business or international trading (Castald, 2012). They did this by specifically designing the phones to have MS Outlook access, allow customers to access their emails on the go while at the same time created the Blackberry Mobile network in order to ensure a certain degree of privacy when it came to people that could contact them. While such a strategy worked for several years, with the arrival of the iPhone and the way in which it revolutionized the smart phone market this necessitated a distinct shift in consumer segment strategies wherein the company decided to expand their products into the realm of social networking wherein the latest Blackberry models allowed their users to use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and o