Finally Blackberry Lost the BattleEssay Preview: Finally Blackberry Lost the BattleReport this essayFinally Blackberry lost the battleThe College of St. ScholasticaEkta GuptaSeptember 23, 2013Global operations management issueBlackberry (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 Canadas 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 (
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.
Few customers again got hit with similar outage recently in 2013.Applications support looks week like BlackBerry App World faces issues.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.
BlackBerry 10 finally launched in January, but sales of the new phones are disappointing.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 fieldBlackberry 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. Thats 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 BlackBerrys 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 itBlackBerry 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 worlds most innovative builders of communications products like two-way pagers and e-mail devices. But story of past six years are of missed opportunities. BlackBerrys 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 RIMs 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 companys future also got delayed in its launch. The delay could make it even harder for RIM to regain market share lost to Apples iPhone and devices running Googles Android operating software. (
Maqsood (2011) stated “RIM was doing really good until 2007, when Apple launched its first iPhone and Google introduced the Android. It was to RIMs 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 (
A, for instance, he noted that when RIM first came to the company, they “had a team (a little over 25+) that was pretty hard to recruit. Most of the companies that were not hiring people in Q2 or Q4 were already making some significant money, so the problem was that their internal RIM team fell apart. They were too focused on getting their products right to succeed. They missed the boat.”)
RIM did it’s best to get as many people on board as possible, but even then, its only ability to create and maintain an atmosphere of innovation and value was simply that the company did the best it could with the people it had. All of this could not be further from the point of view of RIM’s engineers. The employees who used to be working on the hardware were at that point still only getting paid. They did not want to work for a while. At that point, many of us would have to go to work on it for a while until RIM did the hard work in our backyards to get them to move it. Most recently, RIM managed to get one more employee back on because a friend of mine gave RIM a call, and they were looking into whether the company had any potential hires, and the answer they gave him was “yes.” The next month, RIM did another move after it was established that several of our other partners had signed an agreement with IBM, (note that those partners were also already in talks with RIM) and so it was decided against them when it came time to create more employees for IBM.
Then the problems with the employee base really began to become more serious. In the Q2 and Q3 of 2011, RIM employees were getting less work. By the end of the year, RIM was doing what it had always done. It was working as a community tool and its people were not doing themselves any favors, so it was time to find more people to fill the gaps in the staff. It wasn’t that all of these people needed work, it was that those who did needed more time to get more experience.
We don’t know how much the company did but RIM was in a very position position to get more talent. The RIM team knew they needed to bring back at least one new programmer from another company to work on “the hardware,” and in that case we needed some new developers and engineers to work on some new features. In 2012, most of RIM’s people also lost their jobs thanks to what was happening in Taiwan. RIM was on a mission to move to an office that was becoming very small. The RIM team realized that there was no one in Taiwan that could bring a new user to