“Damn you, autocorrect!”
It happened yet again. I had fallen victim to autocorrect fail, a phenomenon that has spawned several hilarious blogs and Twitter feeds. My iPhone decided that instead of typing, “I have to pick up Gooby” (the nickname my brother has been saddled with since he was a baby), it wrote: “I have to pitch up Gov’t.”
I have never, not once, pitched up Gov’t.
But as an iPhone user, I’ve come to accept that these things happen. And in fact, it’s a small price to pay for having a mobile companion that can do everything from track calories burned to play music to have Facetime with Gooby.
That versatility is exactly why I’ll be trading my current iPhone for the newest model when my agreement expires, and not switching to another product. This probably isn’t surprising — except for the fact that I started out as a BlackBerry loyalist. I loved the keyboard and truly believed swiping my way through a touchscreen would be annoying… until I tried it. To me, the difference was night and day. And I’m not the only one. It truly has become an iPhone (and Samsung world) — not exactly the scenario anyone at BlackBerry envisioned just a few short years ago, when everyone knew the term ‘CrackBerry’.
It’s one of the most studied business cases in modern history, and for good reason. BlackBerry quickly rose to the top and absolutely dominated the field, never seeming to fear any competition. And then it all came crashing down; the titan that once held a 50 percent share of the US smartphone market now owns less than 1 percent, according to one estimate.
In 2007, BlackBerry boasted more than 10 million subscribers, a number that was trending upward. “The brand was riding high and it looked like nothing could stop the keyboard revolution,” noted a TechRadar piece which chronicles the company’s not-so-long, strange trip. “There was no sign of concern about the iPhone’s potential as a BlackBerry killer.”
There should have been. Although the company scored with the highly successful BlackBerry Bold, it struck out with back-to-back disappointments in the Storm touchscreen and PlayBook tablet. The latter project was “doomed from the start, largely due to a lack of apps and a clunky interface,” according to TechRadar, not to mention the absence of email or calendar apps upon release.
Things only got worse from there.
2011 brought severe outages for BlackBerry subscribers, following by a big round of layoffs, major delays to the BlackBerry Z10, and the resignation of co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. When the long-awaited Z10 touchscreen was unveiled, the consensus was “too little, too late.”
Talk about a collapse. What’s so intriguing to me is how no one seemed to see it coming — at least no one in the BlackBerry camp. When I picture the company in its 2009 heyday, I picture Henry Hill and Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas after the Lufthansa heist. They were on top of the world, buying extravagant gifts and flexing their muscles all over the place. No one could touch them.
What they weren’t doing was looking over their shoulder — and neither was BlackBerry. At least not enough, according to Craig Hanson of Next World Capital. “BlackBerry’s leadership has sailed that denial river since Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, right up until CEO Thorsten Heins’ comment that there was ‘nothing wrong’ with the company,” he said. “BlackBerry proves that Andrew Grove really did have it right when he said ‘only the paranoid survive.’ That’s probably the best lesson CEOs can take away from BlackBerry’s fall.”
Other successful business leaders shared their thoughts on the sinking of BlackBerry, and what could’ve been done to prevent it. Mark Lee, CEO and founder of Splashtop, said the company lost its “commanding share” of the marketplace because it fell behind on innovation and “failed to recognize the rise of consumer-driven IT buying.”
Matt Allison, CEO and co-founder of TrendKite, said that to be successful, an organization “must have the ability to change, be flexible and re-strategize to align with the market’s needs. Survival is spotting customer pain points and trends, and effectively shift gears to steer towards new opportunities that can still leverage the company’s core competencies and expertise.”
The rise and fall of BlackBerry may be a bit of an extreme example, but there are some valuable nuggets there. Don’t rest on your laurels. Don’t underestimate the competition. Don’t fail to evolve your view of the marketplace. Don’t stop looking over your shoulder.
And most of all, don’t become a cautionary tale.
Share Your Thoughts
You must be logged in to post a comment.