
BlackBerry's success led to its failure - tekheletknight
http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/30/13119924/blackberry-failure-success
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mtgx
A good post from 2010 (it was already obvious to many Blackberry would fail/go
bankrupt then):

[http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.ro/2010/10/whats-really-
wr...](http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.ro/2010/10/whats-really-wrong-with-
blackberry-and.html)

Blackberry's biggest mistake was blinding itself to the truth with "good
financials". It was right there in front them of that they were _losing the US
and Canadians markets_ \- way back in 2009, if not earlier than that. Those
were Blackberry's _core markets_ \- the markets in which its brand was the
_strongest_. And it was losing them!

But it refused to see it or accept it because at the time most of the people
outside of the U.S. had barely heard of the iPhone, perhaps in a TV news
story, and Android was barely a year old and nowhere close to the iPhone sales
numbers.

But in those markets Blackberry had some inertia - people had heard of
Blackberry from a few years back, and it was growing in popularity thanks to
BBM. But the point is this was _irrelevant_.

Blackberry should've known that if it loses its core markets, where it's loved
most, and where people had bought Blackberry phones for years, then it would
only be a matter of time before it would lose the newly acquired emerging
markets, too, where it's brand wasn't even that strong.

Because of this "success" in other markets, Blackberry dragged its feet when
it came to building a solid touchscreen smartphone platform. Perhaps, in its
own arrogance, it even thought that the success in the new markets is
"confirmation" that Blackberry was here to stay, and those new "touchscreen
fads" were irrelevant. But all it had to do is realize that it if it was
losing its most loyal market, then the other markets were being built on
quicksand.

