Research In Motion (RIM) Limited, trading using ‘BlackBerry’ as its brand name, is a wireless equipment and telecommunications company from Canada. Its best-known brands of tablets and Smartphones were the infamous BlachBerries in the year 1999. Its headquarters are in Canada, Waterloo, Ontario City. The founder was Mike Lazaridis, and he served as a co-CEO of the company alongside Jim Balsillie. He founded RIM in 1984and named it after “Poetry in Motion”, a term he encountered in the recent past in a newspaper article that related to football. The current CEO of the company is Thorsten Heins (Balsillie, Lazaridis &McQueen, 2012).
RIM worked with Ericsson and RAM Mobile Data and turned the wireless data network, Mobitex, developed by Ericsson, to a 2-way wireless e-mail and paging network. An important aspect in this development was the launch of inter@ctive Pager 950. This pager began shipping in 1998 august. Its size was almost like that of a bar soap. It competed with SkyTel, from Motorola- one of the earliest competitors of RIM. SkyTel used a paging network that was two-way. Research in Motion used to be a market leader during the Smartphone revolution. Its glaring success was due to its dominance in providing the government with enterprise solutions. RIM had the highest number of government contracts compared to any other provider of Smartphones in the world. This made its revenues to hit the rooftops. In fact, its trading price per share in 2008 was $ 140. The Canadian Institutional Venture Capitalists Investors financed RIM’s early developments from 1995. RIM introduced BlackBerry in 1999, an 850 pager.
The name BlackBerry referred to its resemblance to blackberry fruit duplets by the keys on its keypad. This BlackBerry had complimentary server software i.e. the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) that enabled it to receive push emails from a server from Microsoft Exchange. This set stage for enterprise-oriented products in the future from the company. These included the first of BlackBerry Smartphones, the BlackBerry 957 launched in 200, April. The BlackBerry OS (Operating System) platform, together with the BES increased continually in functionality. The incorporation of S/MIME support and encryption increased the usage of these BlackBerry devices by businesses and governments. RIM also introduced customer-focused BlackBerry devices in order to capture the consumer market. The first of these was the BlackBerry Pearl 8100. This was the first phone of the Blackberry line to incorporate multimedia features like a camera (Foust, 2010).
The Pearl’s introduction was very successful until another of RIM’s competitors, Apple, introduced an iPhone. This prompted the production of the first Smartphone from RIM that had touchscreen features in 2008. This was the BlackBerry Storm, which failed in the consumer market but was successful in the business market. Fortune Magazine named RIM the world’s fastest growing company in 2009 August, recording a growth in profits of 84% over a three-year period despite the recession. Blackberry had a market share of 10.4% of Smartphones in the world by 2010. RIM later introduced to Canadian and United States consumers the BlackBerry PlayBook, a tablet computer in 2011 to consolidate further its market leadership.
The competitors for RIM were Smartphone producing companies like Motorola, Samsung, Apple, and Nokia. A mobile phone made on a mobile OS is a Smartphone. It has advanced connectivity and computing capability. Latest Smartphones models have features like pocket video cameras, GPS navigation, and portable media players with web browsers and high-resolution touch screens. These include Android from Google, iOS from Apple, Symbian from Nokia, Bada from Samsung, and webOS from Hewlett Packard. These firms competed aggressively for market share against the BlackBerry giant and took over most of its enterprise and consumer markets, relying on its shortcomings and failures.
RIM began to lose its market share to its competitors in 2011 when its services started experiencing outages. This was the worst service outage the company ever recorded in history. This service outage disabled BlackBerry users in tens of millions all over Africa, Europe, North America and Middle Asia ability to send or receive BBM messages and emails through their phones. This outage was a result of core switch failure. This was because a transition to the back-up switch failed to function as expected according to earlier tests, and this caused an enormous backlog of data. RIM managed to restore the service a few days later and announced a free premium apps package of $100 for enterprise support extensions ant users. This was to woe consumers back to it after they lost confidence in the company due to the service outage. Moreover, a split in its dual-CEO organizational structure in 2012 to a single CEO loosened the control mechanism and operations within the firm, which allowed other competitors to take over. The two CEOs in office, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, stepped down for Thorsten Heins to take the reins of power in the global phone giant (Mazo & Trautscold, 2010).
The Toronto-based Research in Motion Phone Company dropped from a worldwide revered company because of its innovative phones, synonymous with celebrities, executives and world leaders due to its coveted status symbol, to a ran down industry whose last chance of survival is the newly launched blackberry 10. The company tumbled because of various reasons and frittered away from its massive market share. Some of the factors that eroded RIM’s market dominance are it failure in transition to the consumer market from the corporate world. BlackBerry used to be the ultimate solution in connectivity of high technology before many users accustomed themselves to faster unfettered web access through the mobile and wireless messaging.
The ability to receive and send emails quickly or to trade texts through the BlackBerry Messenger, thereby spawning the CrackBerry moniker made all those in corporate world own or lust for a BlackBerry. This blinded RIM from catching the wave of Smartphones adoption by consumers. The rudimentary support in Blackberry phones of mobile web and multimedia appeared pathetic besides its competitors’ products, such as Android phones from Google and iPhones from Apple. Only the latest innovation of BlackBerry 10 is up to speed with its rivals, though this seems a little too late for them to catch up (Gillet & Tubs, 2011). Unlike its competitors, the iPhones from android, which have only six versions in the market since their original release in 2007, the Research in Motion company floods the market with BlackBerry phones in dozens. To make things worse, these phones have unfriendly consumer names and differences that are imperceptible. These are the Curves, Bolds, Styles, Storms and the Torch. They paired with a 4-digit product moniker such as Bold 9900. This made little or no sense to the customer. RIM spread attention over a multitude of phones instead of concentrating to perfect just a few of their outstanding devices.
The annoying spinning of the hourglass, or battery pulls also made BlackBerry lose its market share. In a twisting turn of events, BlackBerry turned from being the phone loved by everyone to that which everybody loved to hate. With the sophistication of the functionality of the blackberry phones, users knew the clock symbol, or hourglass icon that infuriated them every time it popped up when the phone bogged down. Thus, many customers were of the habit of pulling out the battery after popping out the back lids in order to restore their BlackBerries that were crashing back to life. Moreover, the restarting process of the BlackBerry took eternity.
Browsing using an old model of the BlackBerry is frustratingly futile, i.e. lackluster web browsing. Although the BlackBerry 7 OS brought major improvements to web browsing, it became inadequate as website designs in recent years became more complex. Nowadays more popular websites cannot load in older BlackBerrys. RIM has no apps, and its aggressive push in urging its developers to write apps for their BlackBerrys brand is long overdue. Google Play and Apple’s App Store have a huge lead in the marketplace over RIM, widening a gap that is too big to fill. Though the company is making an effort to include games and apps in BlackBerrys, they still exhibit notable omissions such as Skype, Netflix and Instagram (Hitt, Hoskisson & Ireland, 2012).
BlackBerry is looking to make a comeback through introduction of more updated Smartphones like the BlackBerry 10 OS and through a corporate re-branding. In early 2013, the company changed its public brand name to BlackBerry from Research in Motion. This new name would appear in all their products because some customers already knew the company as BlackBerry. The official launch of BlackBerry 10 OS, along with two other new Smartphones, BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 that based off the platform enabled the company to make a spirited come back in the mobile telephones competition. This is a good move. The brand name will enable consumers identify with it easily, while the new latest applications will enable them enjoy mobile services efficiently. Thereby returning trust confidence and loyalty to the fallen giant. This will enable it to compete on a level ground with its rivals, and not from a distant far (Sweeny, 2009).
References
Balsillie, J., Lazaridis, M. & McQueen, R. (2012). Blackberry: The Inside Story of Research in Motion, Toronto: Key Porter Books.
Foust, B. (2010). Blackberry Java Application Development, Mumbai: Packt Publishing Limited.
Gillet, T. & Tubs, G. (2011). Harvesting the Blackberry: an Insider’s Perspective, Tucson, AZ: Wheatmark Publishers, Inc.
Hitt, M., Hoskisson, R. & Ireland, D. (2012). Strategic Management Cases: Competitiveness and Globalization, Stamford, Connecticut: Cengage Learning.
Mazo, G. & Trautscold, M. (2010). Blackberry Bold Made Simple: For the Blackberry, Bold 9700 Series, New York City: Aspress Publishers.
Sweeny, A. (2009). Blackberry Planet: The Story of Research in Motion and the Little Device that Took the World by Storm, Houston: John Wiley & Sons Limited.
