Last week I heard the news that Blackberry stopped producing their own smartphones. Back in the days everyone wanted a blackberry, most likely thanks to the ping application. I really thought: How is it possible that they have to stop producing their phones? Off course now everywhere you look you almost only see Samsung phones or iPhones. But how is it possible that Blackberry, the company had a market share of nearly 50% in the U.S. in 2009, has to stop producing their own smartphones because it is losing money for the company?
The market share of Blackberry is at the moment less than 1%. The competition keeps introducing and implementing new technologies and customers now a days want the best of the best and the newest of the newest. So if you cannot provide that to your potential customers you will definitely lose the battle. And then you are going to lose money on your own smartphones and you have to stop producing your own hardware component. It almost look the same as the Nokia case. They were also market leader, but when they did not introduce and/or implement new technologies, their market share also decreased dramatically. Blackberry will still give licenses to other hardware production companies if they want to produce Blackberry smartphones based on the latest operating system that is now implemented in the latest versions of Blackberry smartphones. Blackberry will now focus on improving their operating system and/or develop new operating systems.
The downfall of Blackberry is due most through not or to late developing and improving their operating system and it will be a question if they ever will be back on top.
