SmashedBerry: What Went Wrong With RIM?
Autor: rodrigottr | Publicado: 2011-12-21T00:40:00-08:00


RIM's market share is shrinking 
fast. Stocks value also crashing and many are rumours about competitors bidding to buyout RIM.

&nbsp;

That is really surprising 
because at least 6 months ago some analysts still said RIM had a solid 
position and a strong presence into enterprise consumers. And still has 
it. But the question seems to be: for how long?In the beginning smartphones where... Some
 time ago there was no big reason for common people to have a 
smartphone. There was only two proposals smartphones had and they where a
 super cool convergence of multimedia, camera and GPS, the case of Nokia
 N95, and the productivity phones that evolved from PDA's.Blackberry,
 Nokia, and also Palm had phones with this second proposal. And 
productivity was their greatest appeal with that class of higly 
productive people that needed smartphones before everybody else in 
pre-iPhone era.Yes. The iPhone changed this. But not the iPhone 
itself but Apple's App Store. Which started becoming relevant in 2008 
with the introduction of iPhone 3G. That is when Blackberry's chain of 
value for enterprises lost its dominance.While Blackberry had 
the best messaging system, with the best mailing and BBM (and still are 
the best on it), and the best data security, Blackberry was not a OS 
developed to be a ecosystem like the iPhone was. While the iPhone is the
 easiest and most profitable environment for developers RIM's ecosystem 
had limitations like this:




Various screen sizes/densities and button layouts
Data connection. Yes, making a data connection is not trivial on BlackBerry.
OS
 support. Currently, for example, foursquare supports OS 4.2.1 (OS  
running on 4 year old devices) and up. Something doesn't happens on RIM.
Application
 distribution and updating. Foursquare currently makes 3 different 
builds to satisfy varying OS functionality and API features. Some 
companies go as far as making up to 7 or 8 separate build, one for 
almost every OS level.


&nbsp;

Licensing for putting your app in RIM's appstore even costs the developer the amount of 200 Euros Those
 and other reasons unknown by me (I'm not a developer) made the iPhone a
 much more developer friendly platform. Even the iOS experience itself 
is somehow influences the user to buy apps impulsively. And 
still talking about productivity, even without the physical QWERTY 
keyboard, the iPhone's touchscreen offers faster navigation's through 
menus for the user, with the bonus of being more intuitive. Those elements together impacted on Blackberry's greatest appeal: productivityWhile
 Blackberry still has the best and safest messaging, with physical 
keyboard, the iPhone made itself more productive by offering a big pack 
of highly productive apps and services. Services and apps developed for 
particular business areas like nutrition, pharmacy, law etc... Things 
the Blackberry couldn't have. Which even Android has more developed then
 Blackberry.The last and most impacting and cruel features Apple
 brought where a highly safe environment, not as safe as Blackberry's 
cryptography private Internet but an environment most developers 
concerned with safety say you can trust blindly. The messaging services 
like Whatsapp, Kik and others which where available for the iPhone since
 a long time. And now the iCloud, who promises to also have a private 
Internet and who also enabled the iMessaging as a copycat from BBM. The only thing Apple still has not is the QWERTY physical keyboards which after all these features, can be left out. SmashedBerrySo,
 the iPhone ended ruining Blackberry's appeal of productivity over the 
high end and profitable enterprise consumers. But they grew its 
participation between teens and low end consumers. Also consistently 
growing on emerging markets (Brazil and Indonesia). They have enabled a 
good support over social medias, which is the greatest demand from low 
end consumers and teens. And did it right. But Blackberry phonesdidn't
 lowered enough its pricing. Which is extremely important for having 
impact on those consumers and making the environment of BBM to work 
properly generating value.Because of that, RIM's effort on 
gaining market on lower end wasn't effective enough and Blackberry 
phones could not compete with other phones properly designed for those 
markets like qwerty Nokia's and lower end touch screen LGs and Samsungs.
 RIM ended smashed on the high end by the iPhone and low end by other 
more traditional feature phone companies.A way out of the trouble: why did RIM failed to react to this? The
 reader must be thinking that is easy to diagnose and find what is wrong
 after the mess is done. And yes, it is easy, and it is pretty 
comfortable for me to say what went wrong with RIM being outside and 
after the the patient is dead, or in terminal state. But there 
where something wrong with RIM that any business graduation student 
could point, and I'll try to show how this was the true cause of RIM's 
illness. Know who you areWhen the iPhone came in
 2007 RIM trusted on its strong enterprise focused service and 
infrastructure to felt safe. And it was safe. The first iPhone couldn't 
harm the highly productive Blackberry, no matter how fun it was. Then in
 2008 the iPhone 3G came and showed that with apps the iPhone could 
evolve from a cool touch screen feature phone into a true smartphone 
capable of delivering the true productivity that made Blackberry the 
king. After feeling the impact of that RIM failed to see that it was not
 the touch screen the element of productivity from the iPhone, but it 
was the ecosystem, the App Store. RIM reacted to this with wrong phones,
 the Storm, a resistive touch screen device, and the Torch, that 
combines a capacitive touch screen with physical keyboard. Both phones 
failed on sales. During the same moment RIM tracked the correct strategy
 and did focused more products on non enterprise consumers. But 
unfortunately at the same time was fighting for its position in 
enterprise. That only made the branding more confuse and kept RIM 
occupied with the wrong things until in 2010 came the iPad. The 
computing device that would have the greatest impact over enterprise 
users, for the same reason the iPhone 3G had. But now with a bigger 
screen.Again RIM tried to defend its enterprise territory with 
its own tablet the PlayBook. Another fail. And the PlayBook is the point
 I'm looking for to show you what was wrong with RIM: an identity crisis.While writing this article I tried to look for how does 
RIM describes itself. Are them an enterprise solutions company? Are them
 a smartphones company? Are them a enterprise data and communication 
security company? All this three competences describe well what RIM is. 
But what is their priority? What is the goddamn core business of RIM? 
What is their mission and vision?Look what I found: No-thing. 
And look more: I've noticed more people looked for RIM's mission and 
vision statements and also didn't found it. I'm
 not sure if it doesn't exists but if it couldn't be found in annual 
reports then probably it doesn't exists or RIM don't want us to know 
about it, which ends in the same: in the moment of panic, RIM forgot who
 themselves are. 

&nbsp;

For example look at these strategies:&nbsp;

A -
 If RIM defined themselves as enterprise solutions then we could assume 
those are also productivity related solutions. In that case they could 
have since 2008 looked for a way of making Blackberry's ecosystem more 
developer friendly keeping the Blackberry a synonym of productivity.B
 - If RIM defined themselves as data security on wireless communications
 provider then they could have since 2008 looked for the solutions they 
are looking now: to license some services like the private and 
cryptography Internet or maybe the Blackberry system itself getting more
 focused on its core competences and developing unique solutions and 
becoming more unreachable by Apple. Also leaving the hardware for other 
OEM's that build much better hardware and are also tired of depending 
exclusively on Google.C - If RIM defined themselves as wireless 
provider then we could assume their business is selling messaging 
focused smartphones. Then they could have since 2008 focused on bringing
 the winner shape of physical QWERTY and best messaging to lower end 
markets using its better UX to compete side by side, on the same price 
level, with Nokia and Samsung, taking lots of market share from them. But
 what RIM actually did was to do those three strategies simultaneously. 
Ending to not doing any of them well. When the iPhone was introduced 
they trusted on strategy A. And when their position as productivity 
where offended they defended themselves with touchscreen, when apps was 
the right movement. When they intended go lower, with C strategy and 
deliver messaging focused smartphones to normal people, the enterprise 
focused branding helped to hold the price too high. When they intended, 
again, to provide productivity solutions with the PlayBook they mixed 
with the C strategy, and even named a enterprise focused gadged with the
 name PlayBook. What you mean "play"? Without even solving the problem 
of being developer unfriendly. And now, when Nokia, Microsoft, Amazon 
and others are intending to bid for RIM they think about licensing its 
OS and going with B strategy. When unfortunately is too late So,
 yes, bad management killed RIM. That is why as a management consultant 
the first thing I do when I work with an organization is to work on its 
mission, vision and values with the entire company. Doing this work I'm 
helping and making easier all other decisions from high to lower 
management for the future and making the organization more protected 
against the danger of being blindly managed. 
It is very uncommon to see an organization with the size and the 
expertise of RIM to do not have a public mission and vision statements, 
the core of strategic planning. But is also not uncommon to see big 
management mistakes like this on Fortune's 500 companies.