Three months ago this site speculated if BlackBerry had shipped their last smartphone with the Android based Priv handset.
Yesterday BlackBerry announced disappointing sales of the Priv in their latest quarterly financial report, so things aren’t looking good for the company’s hardware business.
It looks like BlackBerry is a great example of a transition effect where a product, occupation or business has a brief period of success as an industry changes before being rendered obsolete by those same forces.
The need for executives to access their emails on mobile devices was the reason for BlackBerry’s success so when the iPhone recast the definition of the smartphone and included email as a standard feature of the device, the reason for BlackBerry handsets existing evaporated.
In many respects, BlackBerry are the perfect example of a disruptor being disrupted.
BlackBerry’s hope to remain a stand alone company lies in the security software and services space, a field where management have been investing heavily in recent years. How well they travel will depend now on how quickly they can jettison old business ideas.