After successful years of being on top of the competition of the mobile phone industry, Blackberry Ltd has posted its biggest quarterly loss of a whopping 965 million dollars. After reading the article on Blackberry’s fall, I saw connections to the company’s decline and business topics studied in class.

One of the main reasons that Blackberry remained relevant throughout the competition between smartphones was because of its physical keyboard which appealed to businessmen not wanting to write extended emails on touchscreens. If Blackberry Ltd had done a SWOT chart and successfully acknowledged that one of their greatest strengths were their physical keyboards, the quarterly fall may have been prevented. Speaking of the SWOT chart, Blackberry Ltd has correctly assessed the opportunity section and went after the unexplored market of touchscreens. However, by doing so they abandoned their strength which was the physical keyboards. Not only that, they entered the market of touchscreens in 2013 when its main competition, Apple Inc, entered the market in 2007 and has been dominating in it. Blackberry Ltd had failed to assess its company appropriately through tools such as the SWOT which resulted in its downfall.

References:

Silcoff, S. (2013, September 27). Inside the fall of BlackBerry: How the smartphone inventor failed to adapt . Retrieved from The Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside-story-of-why-blackberry-is-failing/article14563602/?page=8

Picture: RIM. (Photographer). [Web Photo]. Retrieved from http://agbeat.com/gadgets/smartphones-gadgets/blackberry-z10/