A Farewell to BlackBerry

The greatest irony of the mobile phone industry is that it's the biggest and fastest growing technology market by volumes—with over 1.2 billion units sold each year—while also being the most volatile. Over a dozen companies exited over a decade. Companies such as Motorola, Ericsson, Siemens, NEC and Alcatel becoming defunct or acquired/merged and others like Nokia and LG imploding in sales. There was a time not so long ago when each of these victims were at the top of their markets in terms of share of value, volume or profit.
For each exit there seems to have been some entrant that stormed ahead and quickly took up share from the floundering incumbent. Apple, Sony, Samsung come to mind but we mustn't forget that HTC rose from being an original design engineering company to a global brand (with 80% share in Windows Mobile phones) and that Palm entered from the PDA market (bringing the idea of apps with it) and of course BlackBerry (then known as Research In Motion) started out as a pager company and re-wrote the rules of the industry through compelling services.
I recall how when in 2003 RIM decided to launch a bona fide phone, a RIM executive said that it was easier for them to add phone capability to a BlackBerry Pager than it would be for a phone maker to add reliable email to their products. And he was right. For the next five years the BlackBerry had a near monopoly on mobile email surviving challenges from Microsoft Windows Mobile devices such as Motorola Q and Samsung Blackjack as well as Nokia E series smartphones. Imagine the shock at Microsoft when a small Canadian upstart was able to maintain a lock on corporate mobile email whose accounts were all running Microsoft Exchange.
BlackBerry was winning because it nailed the job to be done of reliable text-based messaging. It did not win because it had some "control point" in the value chain or cozy relationships with all the world's mobile operators. It was not an "insider" in telecom and even had to fight parasitic patent trolls for years.
The tragedy of RIM however was that this extraordinary competence with email was not leveraged into becoming a more general-purpose computer. The resetting of user expectations brought about by the iPhone (notably coming from a computer maker and not a phone company) meant that consumers were willing to tolerate less-than-great email for the benefit of having great browsing, great apps and great media consumption in a handheld. They even tolerated less-than-great phone call quality and battery life and size which was the traditional basis of competition in the phone market in 2007.
It was the trap of suddenly being more than good enough in your core while not being good enough in a new basis of competition which is at the heart of the Innovator's dilemma that condemned RIM. There is a solution to the Dilemma but RIM did not realize they were in a dilemma quickly enough to implement the solution. By the time they did act it was too late.

As the graph above shows, the decline began one year after the iPhone launched but it was foreseeable much earlier. The question since then has always been about execution. It was about whether management could pull off a recovery. The odds were always against it and this week we saw another shoe fall.
As the company put itself officially for sale, one of the original innovators and most beloved smartphone acompany has become a victim of the market it created.

Source :http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130816120721-19021-a-farewell-to-blackberry