The end of an era,

Once the giant of the smartphone market Blackberry, formerly known as research in motion is now on its knees. The company reported an approx. $960 million US dollar , second fiscal loss in the year 2013, recently after the launch of their sought to be game changer product Z10.

Failure to recognize market competition

Rim was at its peak in the year of 2007, the stock price was riding at a massive 230 dollar a share, later very same year it reported 10 million active users worldwide.Rim brought wireless email to the masses, with servers so secure to back it up that governments threatened to shut its services down because they couldnt break into them.

In January 2007, apple Inc. launched their first IPhone; at that time RIM executives ignored the product as a mere plaything. Later Apple had tied up with AT&T for marketing and branding of their flagship phones, and Verizon executives reached out to RIM to develop an iPhone killer, it was the biggest strategic opportunity in their hands, which lead to the launch of blackberry Storm in the late year of 2008. It was months late to the market, ran on a single processor and the software was buggy.

Failure of Rim to provide Verizon with an iPhone substitute made it to turn towards Google Inc.s new operating system Android, and help them build a colossal campaign around Motorolas droid phone in 2009.

The campaign was launched to hurt the sales of iPhones, however the Droid and other android powered smartphones started to steal away the market share from Palm, Microsoft and eventually RIM.

By the end of the year 2010 Androids market share rose by 23.5 percent compared to 5.2 percent a year earlier, where as rim fell by 10 percent to 31.6 percent. By the end of 2011 android had conquered 47.3 percent of the US smartphone market, and Rim had to consent with a 16 percent share.

Shifting focus to applications

RIMs technology was build upon an operating software developed in 1990s and used java codes, while apple and androids system used newer technology and software platforms that allowed the creation of more friendly user interfaces and gave a lot more options to application developers than what RIMs blackberry did.

Rim realized the technological shift and the executives decided to reinvent the company, Apples iphone didnt seem like a threat to RIMs loyal base of customers at that time which where governments and corporations. They relied their sustenance on them while they fixed their technological concerns.

The focus of the users started to shift towards software applications, rather than solely depending over the hardware.RIM, which, with its efficient, low powered devices, had entertained the corporate users, found it difficult to make the transition.

According to one of the company insiders and quote the problem wasnt that we stopped listening to customers, said one former RIM insider. We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did. Consumers would say, I want a faster browser. We might say, You might think you want a faster browser, but you dont want to pay overage on your bill. Well, I want a super big very responsive touchscreen. Well, you might think you want that, but you dont want your phone to die at 2 p.m. We would say, We know better, and theyll eventually figure it out.

It turned out that consumers didnt care a lot about the battery life or security features, they were addicted to apps, which apples Ios and Googles android, were relatively more feasible for outside developers to use.

By this time the share price of the company was trading at $14 dollar a share by the end of 2012.

Blackberry PlaybookThe success of the tablets, lead by apples IPad, pointed towards a successful and rising market of tablets and Research in Motion decided to launch blackberry playbook bases on their newly acquired QNX software which would later go on to find the base for blackberry 10 phonesUnfortunately, the playbook wasnt well received by the market, largely due to an awkward user interface and major applications in the play store.

A dwindled launch

Six years after the launch of apples iPhone, the long awaited blackberry 10 made its debut. The Z10 received a number of positive reviews at the time of the launch. Originally set to launch in 2011, it was delayed into 2012 and did not arrive to the market until January 2013. At this time the subscribers ha d began to decline and it missed out on year-end buying spree that the continent of North American gets into in November and December.

The marketing campaign was puzzling and imprecise; it failed to distinct itself from other products in a commercial that during the super bowl.But yet once again the market had shifted, where a user-friendly interface was a common place and smartphones were getting shoddier. The only thing that could have differentiated the product was the keypad, which wasnt present in their first line of products and didnt make its debut until later that year as Q10.

The company was sluggish in providing services to the business users, transitioning all the old apps to the new platform. App developers were left with a dead end investment as they learned they would have to rewrite the apps for the new platform from the scratch.The unsold inventory of Z10s left a hole of millions in the balance sheet of blackberry by the end of the financial year, nothing but to be written off.