Finally Blackberry Lost the Battle

Finally Blackberry lost the battle

The College of St. Scholastica

Ekta Gupta

September 23, 2013

Global operations management issue

Blackberry (also known as crack berry) once known for being coolest and corporate phone company is failing coping up with its rivals. Although BlackBerry was once Canada's most valuable company with a market value of $83 billion in June 2008, the stock has plummeted from more than $140 a share to less than $9, giving it a market value of $4.6 billion (http://news.yahoo.com/, 2013). Below are some critical issue, Blackberry customers have been facing for last few years:

1. Major trouble started with global outage in October 2011 when services including e-mail, messaging, and Web service got interrupted to more than 10 million customers in Europe, the Middle East, parts of South America, and Africa after a disruption at one of its network operation centers.

2. Few customers again got hit with similar outage recently in 2013.

3. Applications support looks week like BlackBerry App World faces issues.

4. Blackberry 10, the operating system that was meant to save the company, was delayed several times and so were the phones built around the new platform, which left BlackBerry customers with no new phones to buy.

5. BlackBerry 10 finally launched in January, but sales of the new phones are disappointing.

6. Delayed in launch of BBM apps for iOS, Android.

Blackberry has lost its status in maintaining the scheduled launch date which causes more frustration to people and with other available options of Google and I-phone, many customers must have chosen shifting to other phones rather than waiting for unknown times. I think frequent delay in launches has been another major reason Blackberry losing loyal customers around the world.

Reason for selecting this news item and how it relates to a current issue in the field

Blackberry started as the market leader, back in 2003. Since fiscal 2003 (when it turned profitable), RIM has grown from $500m revenue to over $15 billion. That's 30X growth in eight years. This is one of the most impressive business success stories of the last decade. It started off as a professional smartphone and soon gained commendable publicity worldwide. However, lately the BlackBerry's popularity has been declining significantly and it is losing market share, especially to the Android and iOS. Blackberry is sold worldwide and today this once popular brand is on sale which make me curious to learn about the issues causing its downfall.

Being a Global company, there has been all kind of global operations need to be addressed for success. Mobile and latest upcoming technologies are being used worldwide, hence knowing the pitfalls in strategies of Blackberry will help understanding the current business tactics needed for execution at global level.

History of this issue and what are the contemporary theories and research on it

BlackBerry Limited, formerly known as Research In Motion Limited (RIM) is a Canadian telecommunication and wireless equipment company best known as the developer of the BlackBerry brand of smartphones and tablets. It has been a well-known mobile brand known popular at corporate level for its security level and was for years one of the world's most innovative builders of communications products like two-way pagers and e-mail devices. But story of past six years are of missed opportunities. BlackBerry's popularity has been declining significantly and it is losing market share, especially to the Android and iOS (Maqsood, 2011). Maqsood said that starting from the outage of Blackberry services in October 2011 nothing good has happened for it. Sutter (2011) stated "Millions of BlackBerry users remained without service as a three-day network outage spread to North America, causing massive frustrations for people who rely on these smartphones for business and personal communications." This outage was caused by a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure. Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested. People started talking their frustration on twitter. A website called isblackberrystillbroken.com popped up to track developments. Moreover Blackberry has delayed its products several times than its announced dates. For instance BlackBerry 10 which was widely considered crucial to the company's future also got delayed in its launch. The delay could make it even harder for RIM to regain market share lost to Apple's iPhone and devices running Google's Android operating software. (http://news.yahoo.com/, 2013).

Maqsood (2011) stated "RIM was doing really good until 2007, when Apple launched its first iPhone and Google introduced the Android. It was to RIM's severe detriment that it never felt the need for any real innovation. Blackberry users, who were using the same technology for years, were craving change and this fell in their laps through the Android and Apple. Blackberry still did not recognize the need of the hour (innovation) and, assuming they were invincible, continued to provide the same services to their customers. This is where it all began. RIM never felt the need to market their product intensely and other companies took advantage of their over-confidence." According to Michael Mace (http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/, 2010) "In my opinion, RIM's real problems center around two big issues: its market is saturating, and it seems to have lost the ability to create great products. This is a classic problem that eventually faces most successful computer platforms. The danger is not that RIM is about to collapse, but that it'll drift into in a situation where it can't afford the investments needed to succeed in the future. It's very easy for a company to accidentally cross that line, and very hard to get back across it. There's a lesson in RIM's situation for every tech company, so it's worthwhile to spend some time understanding what's happening." USA Today (2013) blames BlackBerry's apps for its downfall "kind of software capabilities a consumer can add to a smartphone after buying it is now much more important than the features packed into the phone by its maker. There wasn't enough for consumers to do