Blackberry. Ten years ago, it was the toast of the business world; it was the must-have accessory – the first real smartphone. If people took one out in public, there would be coos of affection. It had a keyboard! It could do maps! Get your emails! It was all but magic compared to the brick-like Nokias most of us were still toting. When Channel 5 comes around to commissioning "I love the noughties", they are sure to be featured, with a forgettable comedian saying "Oooh! I remember them! With the little screens!"
Sadly, Blackberry wasn't able to keep pace with its rivals – it was too wedded to old ideas. Its farcical idea of launching one OS for 10 years is looked at in the tech world with derision. Who knows what tech will look like in ten years time? I'll tell you something for nothing, it won't look like Blackberry 10. Today's launch of the new system (at which the company ditched the name RIM, as if anyone cared) has attracted more morbid fascination than excitement – it has the feel of a faded Hollywood star turning to "erotic thrillers" to pay the rent. From the red carpet to the sticky carpet, if you like.
What's tragic is that Blackberry won't admit their mistakes – as this absolute car-crash BBC interview with their European Managing director demonstrates. The man's clearly been media-trained within an inch of his life, but when asked the question, "what went wrong?" he starts sweating like a paedophile in a playground. The truth is, they had a dominant market position – as much as 46 per cent of the business market in 2008 – which has now shrunk to a pathetic 2 per cent, taking $70 billion of shareholder value and thousands of Canadian jobs with it. Just like many other businesses that have folded over the last year, the symptoms vary but the illness is the same – catastrophically poor management. Of course, it's probably hard for a spokesperson to say that out loud.
Blackberry is a dying brand, living out its death throes mostly being used by low-value customers. Poor youths in the first world are enticed by its free BBM messaging, but people who are dissuaded from spending a penny on a text are not really the people you want using your phone, especially when they use it to advertise looting hot spots.
Equally, I'm assured it's the phone of choice among the hot-to-trot in downtown Lagos, but again, a small band of wealthy folk in the third world does not a business model make. Besides, evidence from China seems to suggest that Apple's strategy of rebranding once-top-of-the-line handsets as budget entry models seems to suggest that even these few remaining profitable niches will soon disappear.
Blackberry never saw Apple coming, always assumed it would control the high-end business market. They saw the iPhone as no threat to the mighty RIM product, that a specialist phone company would always beat a vaguely artsy design-led computer firm. Of course, Apple definitely aren't a computer company any more. Last quarter, they sold 4.2 million Macs, but 23 million iPads and an astonishing 47.8 million iPhones, and the phone numbers are only rising and rising. This is over a period where Blackberry sales have been falling as much as 43 per cent a quarter, and in the last quarter of 2012, fewer than five million Blackberries were shipped.
The fruit war is over, and Apple has won. If you need any more proof that I am right, Piers Morgan has taken to Twitter to tell us exactly how cool he thinks his new BlackBerry 10 phone is. The real fight is now Apple vs Android. The only question remaining over BlackBerry is "when will it fold?"
