
The decline of BlackBerry in one chart - tareqak
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/20/the-demise-of-blackberry-in-one-chart/
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stevenwei
I would love to see a chart with a scale using absolute figures (# of devices
sold) instead of percentage market share.

I am more curious just how much bigger the market became post-iPhone.

~~~
OrwellianChild
Ask and you shall receive... I was curious about same, and compiled some data
from Gartner and IDC.

[http://exceltactics.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/Smartphon...](http://exceltactics.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/SmartphoneUnitsShipped.png)

The kicker here is just how much the market for smartphones grew in the past 3
years. Back when BlackBerry had that impressive market share in 2009, the
entire size of the smartphone market was miniscule (171m units shipped)
compared with the end of 2012 (701m). Shipments are up even more (47%
year/year) in 2013.

In fact, BlackBerry shipped as many units in 2012 as in 2009. It just so
happens that Android shipped 13x that (and Apple managed near 4x)...

~~~
OrwellianChild
I couldn't stop there... I "fixed" the original ComScore chart by making the
width proportional to the total market size per year. _This_ is the
legitimately apples-to-apples comparison of the market share over the years.
Enjoy...

[http://exceltactics.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/ComscoreC...](http://exceltactics.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/ComscoreChartFixed.png)

~~~
seldo
This is excellent, how on earth did you manage it?

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OrwellianChild
Thanks! Glad you like it!

I already had the data from the first area chart, so I built a line graph on
the same timeline that just had market size as a % of 2012. Imported that as a
mask in Photoshop and squished everything down to match.

And because I seem to be incapable of explaining without images, here ya go:
[http://exceltactics.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/HowItWasD...](http://exceltactics.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/HowItWasDone.png)

~~~
seldo
Huh! That's awesome. I had no idea Photoshop masks could be used to distort
images in that way. Good job!

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ComputerGuru
It's a misleading chart - it's _definitely_ not a zero-sum game.

It's only this past ~2 years that pretty much all new phones being sold are
"smartphones" (for some definition of that word). The overwhelming majority
has always been dumb "feature phones" \- Android and iOS managed to get
everyone to want a smartphone in their pocket and that's where the biggest
gains were made - _not_ as that graph would seem to imply, by simply
cannibalizing the pre-existing smartphone markets.

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hanley
Looks like this chart is just the US. I'd like to see other regional charts,
and a global one as well.

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Zaheer
Interesting how Blackberry continued to grow until mid-2010 even after
iOS/Android had made their debut. They had a chance then but not anymore.

~~~
alooPotato
Looks like much of the share was actually taken from Android

~~~
Zaheer
I don't about that but one reasonable guess is that large firms that were
contracted with RIM may have been hesitant to end their contract when the
iPhone/Android initially came out and after it was a bit proved actually
switched away causing massive drop-offs. This may especially be true since
most RIM customers likely were businesses.

~~~
derekp7
Yes, very few people I know of would buy a Blackberry for their personal
device. Also, back then people that needed to be in business contact carried a
business-provided device -- very seldom would they use a personal device (and
many cases wouldn't even have a personal device). Now it has become almost
universal that everyone has family plans, and has their own device -- and not
wanting to carry two devices, they use their personal (non-Blackberry) device
for work (and get reimbursed). This was almost unthinkable in at least the
jobs I used to work at (large fortune 50 companies, financial, etc).

~~~
stevekemp
It's funny I've been considering a blackberry for myself for the past few
weeks - solely because they're one of the few current-phones that have
hardware keyboards.

I've been waiting to see how things would turn out for them and deciding if I
pull the trigger, or wait for a new android device to come out.

I guess I wait now. (I used to own a palm-pre, were they still current I'd
take one in a shot.)

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vwinsyee
I didn't realize that Windows Mobile had such large market share at one point.

~~~
contingencies
It's probably largely down to the definition of what a smartphone was back
then. The same graph scaled by market size or including dumbphones would be
more interesting.

~~~
seldo
Yeah, I was confused by Windows' apparently-large share as well, and I figured
it was a definition thing as well, but if you look at these sales figures:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#Historical_sales_fig...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#Historical_sales_figures_.28in_millions_of_units.29)

Microsoft sold 14 million smartphones (or rather, their device partners,
probably mostly HTC back then) in 2007, but according to this article from
2007, RIM was running at about 9.6 million devices a year, which matches what
wikipedia says:

[http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/1830466/blackberry-
sales...](http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/1830466/blackberry-sales-double)

So at some point in 2007 Microsoft some crazy how had something like a third
of the smartphone market.

~~~
shalmanese
To this day, when I sign for packages or get my ticket scanned at events, I
occasionally see Windows Mobile 6 phones powering those systems.

I suspect fleet deployments were a big part of their sales.

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stewdio
For an article titled “The decline of BlackBerry in one chart” you’d think
that it’d be a well-designed intuitive chart that emphasizes the decline of
Blackberry. Instead what’s presented is accurate but unintuitive and could
easily be titled “The decline of Palm in one chart” or “The decline of Windows
Mobile in one chart” or even Symbian. There’s no visual hierarchy—the main
idea isn’t leaping out of this graph. (And sometimes design is as much about
what you _don’t_ show.) And if you’re really bent on showing all the big
players at once there are more compelling ways to do it than this. I normally
wouldn’t feel compelled to comment on something so small but it’s... It’s the
TITLE OF THE ARTICLE!

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GrinningFool
Author makes a pretty infographic that doesn't actually convey what she was
aiming for (BB lost market share? Palm devices are still in use? Windows
mobile lost out and never recovered? )

Between that, and the opening line, "BlackBerry stocks plunged 22 points this
afternoon... "[1] I almost stopped reading.

The conclusion makes me wish that I had: "every major smartphone platform from
early 2007 has become a practical non-entity since the rise of Android and
iOS."

Is it just my imagination, or do the other platforms have a combined total of
15% of the market at the end of that graphic ? Individually it doesn't break
down well, but collectively non-entity doesn't seem a good fit.

[1]
[http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/04/043004.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/04/043004.asp)

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um304
Looks like Android is the biggest beneficiary, in terms of market share, of
the change triggered by iPhone. Of course it is an obvious fact, but this
graph makes it visually clear.

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tedunangst
Wow. It looks like RIM and Apple both peaked around January 2010 (though Apple
starts climbing again towards the end). I never would have guessed that.

~~~
MBCook
Percentage wise, perhaps. But Apple's phone sales continue to grow, it's just
that Android (and smartphones in general) are growing faster.

I'd say the percentage scale on this graph does a disservice, considering the
_huge_ magnitude of difference between 2005 and 2012 market size.

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tareqak
I am probably reading the chart a little wrong, but I am curious about that
slump in between January 2005 and January 2006 for all mobile OSes (or maybe
all but Symbian).

~~~
seldo
Remember this is a percentage market share chart, so it always adds up to
100%. The "slump" you see is a spike in Symbian share.

Related: it's important to realize when reading this chart that the absolute
number of phone shipped in this period was exploding from year to year: it's
quite possible that every single manufacturer on the chart (except maybe Palm)
shipped more devices every single year; Android and Apple just grew faster
than the others.

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pearjuice
Funny how the URL states "the demise of blackberry in one chart". Note the
subtle yet impacting difference between "demise" and "decline"

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dnautics
there are still people using palmOS?

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chris_wot
How the hell do I read that chart?

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logicallee
Left-to-right.

It's like a series of staggered bars one next to another -
[http://epmxperts.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/monthly-
graph.p...](http://epmxperts.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/monthly-graph.png) \-
with two differences:

1) It's continuous, rather than a series of discrete bars. (The linked bar
chart could also be continuous, especially if they had that granularity of
data. But you could try visually faking it by just connecting the bars into a
similar effect.)

2) It represents market share, not absolute volume, so always adds up to 100%.
Each point along the X axis contains the same information as a pie chart would
at that date, showing current market share.

Overall the effect is that you can track the 'shape' of the componnets as you
read left-to-right. This is similar to the effect of this famous chart,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard#Informati...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard#Information_graphics)
\- where you can see the 'width' of Napoleon's army as it marched
geographically.

In this case the "the size of the army - providing a strong visual
representation of human suffering" is the size of RIM's market share (along
with everyone else's, but this is the component the title draws our attention
to), providing a strong visual representation of its suffering.

And you can actually read left-to-right over time instead of having to look at
it embedded in geography, as with the Napoleon campaign chart.

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jstalin
Does anyone remember Treo?

~~~
a3n
I have two in my sock drawer.

