Blackberry’s demise yet another cautionary business tale

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/08/2017 (3367 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The news of the latest nail in BlackBerry’s coffin came not in a torrent, but more as a pathetic trickle.

Samsung Canada announced last week it had become only the second company approved to provide smartphones to Shared Services Canada, the federal government’s principal IT agency. The arrival of Samsung ends BlackBerry’s decades-long stranglehold as principal provider of mobile devices to federal government employees and politicians.

The decision to welcome Samsung devices is not the death knell for BlackBerry; the awful fact of the matter is that the Waterloo, Ont., company has been on life-support for some time.

Its failure to keep up with the breakneck speed of innovation in the smartphone space, along with its propensity for delivering flawed and underperforming devices, had been slowly eating away at BlackBerry’s once-dominant market ranking. Once the gold standard for mobile communication, BlackBerry has largely been reduced to a cautionary case study in business schools about how smart companies need to keep getting smarter to stay successful.

BlackBerry’s decline is not unique, per se, but it is both tragic and instructive. As competitors developed smaller, more powerful and more attractive phones that could do more than just email and voice calls, BlackBerry hesitated, thinking that its ubiquitous thumb-operated keyboard would compete with the shiny-penny allure of the touch screen. History will show the company’s braintrust was spectacularly wrong in that assumption.

Now, BlackBerry is mentioned in the same breath as extinct or greatly diminished companies such as Kodak, which invented digital photography but stumbled badly in its attempts to bring it to consumers, and Blockbuster, which clung desperately to its video-rental business model even when it was clear that content streaming was the way of the future. Back in 2000, Blockbuster had a chance to buy Netflix for US$50 million, but deferred. Now, Netflix has a market value of more than US$32 billion, and Blockbuster stores have been converted into gyms and Taco Bells.

Although part of the same failed-business club as Kodak and Blockbuster, BlackBerry is still fighting desperately to remain relevant and solvent. Currently, the plan is to continue developing software for smartphones or, as company executives put it, focusing on providing the “smart in smartphone.” BlackBerry has also licensed some of its proprietary applications to other phone makers.

The news of Samsung’s arrival as an approved supplier to the federal government will not exacerbate BlackBerry’s predicament. Even though BlackBerrys remained the phone of choice for federal employees, Samsung and Apple iPhones had slowly wormed their way into day-to-day use in Ottawa. (Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s frequent selfies and tweets, for example, are authored on an iPhone).

Still, with another approved smartphone supplier in place, the federal government can slowly start taking its BlackBerrys out of service until, one day soon, there will be no more.

BlackBerry largely created the whole mobile-technology craze, and in doing so helped to forever change the way government and politics function.

BlackBerry, you will be missed. It’s too bad in your rush to bring mobile technology to the masses, you couldn’t have taken a bit of time to see what was coming down the road.