Month: September 2013

Article: http://www.itpro.co.uk/mobile/20680/blackberry-hit-934m-inventory-charge-over-unsold-z10-smartphones

Blackberry has just received a monstrous $934 million loss due to their inventory charge on unsold Z10 smart phones. They had extremely high hopes for this new smart phone release, believing that it would be the solution in their quest to regain their previous stronghold in the smartphone market. The physical keyboard that Blackberry had previously built into their phones was very attractive to text communicating consumers. I believe this particular segment of customers represented a high percentage of their overall customer base. With an all touch screen front and no physical buttons, I’d say that their new smartphone was tailored to lure in a younger audience; however, I believe this new design may have had the unintentional side effect of causing it to be more closely compared to their main competitor’s product, the iPhone 5S. With relatively similar designs, the main comparison points between the two would essentially be brand name, functionality, and price. With Apple having successfully marketed their smartphone as “premium”, Blackberry’s Z10 appears to be “second tier” in comparison. It would have been beneficial for Blackberry to “test the waters” and get an idea of how well their new product would do over a trial period, even if this would inevitably lead to a higher demand than supply. A higher demand would have been much less dangerous to Blackberry than the current reality they face.

Article: http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/verizons-diabolical-plan-turn-the-web-pay-view-226662

Verizon is in the process of pursuing a drastic change in their business strategy. Currently, like almost every other internet service provider, they charge their subscribers a monthly fee for unlimited internet data. To increase profits, they want to begin charging popular producers of internet content (e.g. News websites) for the privilege of letting Verizon customers view their website. In other words, if a Verizon user wants to view a website that hasn’t paid the privilege fee, the site will be inaccessible. Colossal implications for their stakeholders and competition will be felt if this is successful. Their customers will undoubtedly be very unhappy with this decision, so much so that it would be unsurprising for them to switch internet service providers. However, it would be unwise for Verizon to not have predicted this in my opinion. I believe its quite possible that when they successfully carry this out, it’s only a matter of time before other big name ISPs follow their lead. Stakeholders from every ISP giant has the potential to be affected here. Profits will surge for these Verizon styled businesses at the expense of internet content producers/internet users. Alternatively, and this is what I believe will happen if leading ISPs implement Verizon’s strategy, new ISP businesses will emerge to satisfy the desire (of millions of people) to have net neutrality, dealing a large blow to the profits of Verizon and its counterparts.