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Continuing on from our previous article, we take an insider’s look at the strategic decisions inside BlackBerry that have ultimately led to its downfall over the last few years. Last time, we wrote about how, soon after the iPhone came out, there was a lot of confusion in the company about how their hardware design should proceed and many advocated producing touchscreen smartphones. Meanwhile, others were obsessed with sticking to BlackBerry’s formula of phones with physical-ketybaords that had served them so well in the beginning.

A major decision BlackBerry made around this time was to acquire the Canadian company Quantum Software Systems in 2010. They wanted to use their Unix-like QNX operating system in the playbook and later in the BlackBerry 10 software. However, many now see this as a major mistake:

Claiming QNX is a “cutting edge” software company is ridiculous. They brought their own set of hubris, their own attitudes and (severely antiquated) practices. QNX infected BlackBerry at many levels

It has been said that the QNX developers lacked the technical know-how to do was required at BlackBerry. Ex-employees at the company even claim that because of this acquisition, the product elegant team was infested with sub-par talent and incompetent engineers.

By 2013, it was soon clear that the QNX experiment and BlackBerry 10 as a project had been a major disappointment if not an outright failure.

In the previous years, within the company, co-CEO Jim Balsillie had been arguing for significant change in direction to try and rescue BlackBerry from the ever-nearer precipice they were approaching. His master plan was to capitalise on the popularity of their proprietary messaging system, BBM. Massively popular with teenagers and people in developing countries, BBM was used by millions of users every day and was completely controlled by BlackBerry.

His plan, was to morph BlackBerry into a services provider and for them to dominate a different vertical in the mobile ecosystem. If they could persuade mobile networks to use BBM as the new de facto standard for instant messaging, BlackBerry would have a role to play on every smart phone in the world. He envisaged that eventually, BBM could potentially replace SMS text messages.

If somehow BlackBerry could get their messaging service onto all sorts of non-BlackBerry smart phones, they would have access to an enormous source of new revenue from fees charged for each message sent. It was Balsillie’s big idea.

However, it wasn’t to be. Soon rival messaging services such as Kik Messenger and WhatsApp were cornering the market. In January 2012, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie resigned as the joint CEOs of BlackBerry and Thorsten Heins took over. Not long after, Heins and Lazaridis agreed to kill Balsillie’s dream for BBM.

Now BlackBerry are releasing a version of BBM for android and iOS smart phones but the damage has probably already been done. Most industry analysts think it’s too little too late.

Just a few days ago BlackBerry published an open letter in The Times. It’s also reproduced on their website and the message is clear. BlackBerry are desperate and they need to persuade consumers that they are still a meaningful force and a viable option. They want to say loud and clear “You can continue to count on BlackBerry”.

The letter itself if worth a read. It’s a defiant call and a strong attempt to show why BlackBerry is still relevant. Only time will tell whether this is the end of BlackBerry or merely a new beginning.

What’s your take? Should BlackBerry have tried to roll-out BBM to other platforms much sooner? Were they wrong to embrace touchscreens over concentrating on devices with physical keyboards? And was using QNX as the basis for the BlackBerry 10 operating system a major mistake? Let us know below.

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Troubled BlackBerry recently announced that the company was up for sale and actively looking for a buyer. The company, famous for its business-friendly pioneering smartphones, was once a dominant player but has recently seen its market share crash from almost 50% three years ago to less than 5% today.

There was recently a fascinating article in Canada’s Globe and Mail which offers an insightful inside-view about the downfall of Blackberry. It also elucidates a different perspective behind BlackBerry’s recent announcement that they will be releasing their BBM messaging service to other platforms this year.

The piece of investigative journalism is drawn from interviews with several of the most senior key players within the company has seen its fortunes wane over the past few years. For many fans of BlackBerry who’ve watched over £50 billion on the company’s market value be wiped off in just five years, it’s a mystery as to how things could have gone so wrong so quickly. After all, BlackBerry pretty much invented the smartphone market itself.

However, inside the company, founder and ex-CEO Mike Lazaridis had been warning against their strategic decisions for some time. BlackBerry had always done well courting corporate customers – even Barack Obama admitted to being addicted to his BlackBerry – but with the release of BlackBerry 10, they aimed after the general smart phone market by releasing yet another touchscreen handsets to compete against the iPhone and the plethora of Android devices.

Let’s turn the clock back a little… Four years ago, in 2009, RIM (as BlackBerry was known back then) Was undergoing a massive global expansion. Fortune had declared that it was the world’s fastest-growing company. And market research demonstrated that 80% of people wanting to buy a smart phone were going to get a BlackBerry.

However, just a couple of years later in December 2010, BlackBerry was already showing signs of struggling. According to ComScore, RIM’s market share has been slashed from over 40% to just 36.1%. by the next year, it had fallen even further to just over 15%. Much of this was due to competition from Google’s competing Android platform which had seen its market share rise to almost a quarter at the end of 2010 and then almost doubled over the following year.

In general, after the iPhone first came out and Android began to get a foothold in the smartphone market, BlackBerry was in an era of strategic confusion. They were lost in the marketplace that has rapidly developed and weren’t sure how to differentiate themselves in light of all the incoming threats. In particular, they forgot what made them popular in the first place.

Many within the company thought that by focusing on being the only smartphones available with a physical keyboard as opposed to touchscreen, they would carve out a strong and enduring niche for themselves.

Others thought that this was missing the point and the diehard fans and traditional customers didn’t especially love the concept of the physical keyboard and its physical manifestation – rather, I like blackberries because the physical keyboard represented its business-focused and professional ethos that differentiated blackberries handsets from Apple’s and Google’s.

By focusing purely on physical keyboards, and failing to react in other ways, BlackBerry failed to maintain a grasp on its core market. And as sales dwindled, they got more and more desperate and started to reconsider touchscreen devices again.

One early example was their abortive attempt at producing a tablet to compete with Apple’s iPad. It was a failure, and BlackBerry were forced to slash the price almost immediately in order to shift unsold stocks. the Playbook was also in many ways a turning point for the company. In the financial markets, it was becoming obvious that BlackBerry were struggling. The stock lost over three quarters of its value and by getting distracted with the Playbook project, the new version of the operating system – BlackBerry 10 – suffered from substantial delays.

Check out part 2 of this article about BlackBerry’s decline over the last few years…

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BlackBerry services are now, at long last, live and active on Giffgaff. As of this morning, all BlackBerry-owning Giffgaff customers have been able to receive push emails and communicate by BBM to their hearts’ content. So far everything seems to be running smoothly and, in keeping with their low-cost service, the price is just £3/month.

This means that on Giffgaff you can now get 250 any network minutes, completely unlimited texts and unlimited data plus BlackBerry services for a total of just £13/month. We’ve had a look at the other networks’ available deals and that offering is pretty much unbeatable. Giffgaff’s BlackBerry offering even heavily undercuts its parent network, O₂. For only 100 minutes (and 100 O₂ minutes) and just 1GB of data, you would be paying £20/month instead.

Order a free Giffgaff SIM card from us today and you’ll be up and running with your BlackBerry on Giffgaff before you know it. Not only that but you’ll start off with £5 free credit and you can keep your old number.

For more details on BlackBerry services on Giffgaff, check out our first post about the announcement.

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