By Simon
Wright - Follow me on Twitter @Siwri88
This article was written for TheRankTank
It was once
the powerful and popular smartphone of its time, but now the dream for
BlackBerry is most definitely over.
Technical
problems combined with the lack of development, clashes with society and poor
sales have led to the Canadian company effectively agreeing to sell up to a
consortium led by its biggest shareholder Fairfax Financial.
So what went
wrong for a company that changed the smartphone landscape, but has now simply
become another statistic in the economic recession we live in today?
Firstly, BlackBerry
App World simply did not have the capabilities of its rivals such as the Google
Play Store for Android and Apple’s powerful App Store. While the basics any customer would expect
such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were offered, that was as far as it
got. As the consumer started to want
more apps for their phone and therefore a wider choice, the sales in the
BlackBerry phones started to drop quite considerably.
 |
| The BlackBerry Z10 simply didn't provide the sales the company needed |
This was
further underlined last week by a massive loss of £600m in the second quarter
of this year alone. 4,500 employers will
lose their jobs as a result; around 40 per cent of the workforce although it is
unclear how many positions will go at the European headquarters in Slough.
Secondly the
new phones BlackBerry (Z10 pictured) put their efforts into simply didn’t sell with the
market.
While Apple and Samsung stormed
ahead with major new investments in their latest gadgets, BlackBerry would only
often look into minor improvements to their models – simply not enough to stay
afloat as a viable competitor. It has
been overtaken by the likes of the Sony Xperia and the HTC brand in recent
years. When it decided for a complete
overhaul with the new and much delayed Z10 smartphone at the start of 2013, the
damage had already been done.
Thirdly the
consensus is the year that completely finished BlackBerry off was 2011. That summer saw the devastating riots that
swept across the United Kingdom following the shooting of Mark Duggan in
Tottenham. Social media became a
powerful communication tool and the private messaging service BlackBerry
messenger or BBM as it is more commonly known was used to organise deliberate
looting, robbing and often destruction of innocent businesses. The media quickly jumped on the bandwagon of
this, with statistics revealing that 37 per cent of the UK smartphone market in
urban areas with a lack of social wealth having a BlackBerry phone.
RIM’s
reputation took a big hit, and worse was to come in October of the same year
when its servers crashed; meaning millions of customers were left without
access to their e-mails, the internet or the BBM service for days. This writer knows only too well as I
purchased a BlackBerry at around this time, a move quickly regretted but left
stuck with for the next two years.
BlackBerry’s response to this crisis can only be described as slow, lazy
and unwilling to accept responsibility.
Apple users were delighted and took to Twitter with tweets such as ‘Dear
BlackBerry, HAHAHAHA! Sincerely Apple!’
The company’s
CEO made a video apology, but far too late to satisfy anyone and a compensation
package of free apps was not appreciated by many. When customers need to pay 99p to access Wikipedia,
this alone sums up BlackBerry’s problems in a nutshell. In this instance, the consumer should come
first and it never did when it came to the RIM server crash.
BBM, often a
unique selling point of the BlackBerry phones has now been made available as a
free download for Apple and Android devices as it starts to get outmuscled by
other free messaging applications like SnapChat and WhatsApp. With its identity lost, it becomes far more
difficult to sell BlackBerry phones to any sensible member of the public.
Throw in a
general lack of reliability with a phone lucky to last seven months even in a
calm, gentle condition and the dreadful BlackBerry PlayBook tablet that was
doomed from launch due to the lack of apps, and not even having access to a
decent calendar; there have been many issues that weren’t ironed out by the
company’s owners.
Another
former major powerhouse in phone technology was Nokia and they recently were
taken over by Microsoft so there might still be a future in new hands for the
popular brand that created the slick and stylish Lumia phone, but simply didn’t
have the technology to take on market leaders Samsung and Apple.
For
BlackBerry though, the future is a very bleak one. It might still be a handy phone for those who
focus on business in their lives, but when it comes to pleasure or leisure use,
my advice is to stay well away and look at other options. It is difficult to see BlackBerry having much
of an existence in the next five years. Its
many bugs have finally been exposed to the world, and although it will have its
place in the history of the mobile phone – it is definitely not going to be a
part of the future of this extremely popular and necessary gadget.
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