Analysis: BlackBerry was left wanting as iPhone and Android soared

Published on Tuesday 24 January 2012 00:00

I USED to have a BlackBerry. I dug it out from a drawer last week as my Mum wanted to see what all the fuss was about smartphones.

She wasn’t impressed. Compared to my Android-powered HTC Desire HD, even the latest BlackBerrys feel clunky and limited.

RIM (Research in Motion), the maker of BlackBerry, has been on an explosive growth curve since 2002. In fact, things look rosy. Sales rocketed from $294 million (£188m) in 2002 to more than $19 billion (£12bn) in 2011.

The BlackBerry was a corporate messiah when it first launched in the early 2000s, ungluing executives from their offices as it meant e-mails could be answered anywhere. But RIM wanted a slice of the juicy consumer pie as well – and it succeeded up until early 2009, when it was selling more than 34 million handsets a year, against just under 25 million for iPhone and 6.8 million for Android.

So how did RIM go from hero to zero, with its shareholders losing nearly $70bn (82 per cent of value) between 2008 and 2011?

Simple: BlackBerry had been caught straddling two markets, while mastering neither. Its seemingly rock-solid niche in corporate e-mail was destroyed by the iPhone, with Apple claiming last month that 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies use iPhones for their workers.

BlackBerry has been further assaulted by Android’s mesmeric mass-market growth. From a standing start, Google’s system has exploded to dominate 43 per cent of worldwide smartphone sales in the second quarter of 2011, according to tech research firm Gartner.

For some business types BlackBerry still provides the strong, reassuring handshake of a retired soldier. However, for the PlayStation generation and blue-chip firms, the decision is almost always Android or Apple.

• Josh Welensky is The Scotsman Magazine’s technology writer

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