The steep fall of Blackberry out of the smart-phone industry has not lacked media coverage since the 2008 stock market crash and the overwhelming popularity of Apple’s iPhone brand. Media has kept consumers updated that Blackberry’s stock value is plummeting and job layoffs are inevitable. Blackberry’s failure came from a combination of missed opportunities, lack of innovation and the disastrous decision to launch the Z10, the company’s first non-keyboard product that was massively unsold and recently caused a $965-million quarter loss.

Personally, I don’t think it was a bad choice for Blackberry to release the Z10 phone, although the timing of the Z10’s release could not have been worse. Blackberry should have started brainstorming touch screen designs as soon as they started feeling market share pressure from iPhone and Samsung. Although its an expensive and risky investment for companies to expand their product lines, the competitive advantage Blackberry could have attained by expanding their customer base with phone varieties would have outweighed the heavy investment. Blackberry spent too much valuable time improving the Z10 that by the time it was released in 2013 both Samsung and Apple had already become rooted leaders in their positions, so another touchphone didn’t appeal to consumers.

Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside-story-of-why-blackberry-is-failing/article14563602/?page=all#dashboard/follows/

Source: http://cdn-static.cnet.co.uk/i/c/blg/cat/mobiles/blackberry-broken.jpg