Can BlackBerry 10 save BlackBerry?

4th
February 2013

The launch of BlackBerry 10 is easily one of the most
highly anticipated announcements of the past few months. As almost
everybody knows, BB10 is a make-or-break deal for BlackBerry.. but
what are the chances of it succeeding?

There are some promising signs - the company formerly known as
Research in Motion is so committed to this new platform that it
has changed its name to BlackBerry. This is important because there
were rumours that RIM might try to punt the handset business to
someone else and revert to being just an intellectual property company.
On one level, this is a statement of confidence in the new platform.
On another it is an indication that BlackBerry will sink or swim
on this product announcement.

The hardware looks great - hands on reports of the new Z10 indicate
that it is fantastically well-made. The software looks fairly polished
with a few rough edges that will probably be fixed soon, and it
seems to be more modern than iOS and Android but less minimalist
than Windows, and with several powerful features that set it apart
from the competition.

But
building a better mousetrap doesn't necessarily mean that people
will beat a path to your door. There are several examples from history
where mobile phone companies have tried to turn around their fortunes
and failed.

One such story is that of Palm. As with BlackBerry, Palm was
once the market leader in its particular segment, that of the handheld
PDA. When that market started to morph into smartphones, Palm followed
very slowly and an agonisingly long decline followed. But rather
than just face extinction, Palm worked extremely hard and came up
with a highly competitive product in the Palm
Pre, which certainly in terms of software (WebOS) was easily
better than the competition and it was based on a competent hardware
platform. Palm pushed the Pre with a massive advertising programme,
and development continued when HP
took Palm over. Despite everything, neither HP nor Palm could
turn the thing around and the whole range was killed
off.

There are other parallels. Nokia fell quickly out of favour,
and despite spending an enormous amount of effort with the new Lumia
range of Windows phones they are still struggling in the
market. Motorola also nearly collapsed after taking its eye
off the ball and never recovered its market share, and
is now propped
up by Google.

Nokia,
Motorola, Palm and BlackBerry all made the fatal (or nearly fatal)
mistake of not spotting the warning signs early enough. We pointed
out the problems with the BlackBerry roadmap back in 2009 and
things really only got worse after that. Tech companies need to
be looking not only at the next big thing, but they need to be looking
at the next big thing after that too.

It would seem then that history teaches us that tech companies
cannot turn themselves around, but there is one major exception
to this rule, and that is Apple. During the late 1980s and most
of the 1990s, Apple was fading away. By 1997 the company was on
its knees and had been haemorrhaging cash for a long time, and it
looked like Apple's future was seriously in doubt. Obviously, Apple
is now one of the most successful companies in the industry.. so
what happened? The answer is: Steve Jobs. Jobs fundamentally changed
the culture within Apple and explored new and very innovative profit
lines.

What BlackBerry needs is a Jobsian-level of change, and BlackBerry
CEO Thorsten Heins claims that this process has already started.
But the market is much more competitive than it was in pre-iPhone
days, and BlackBerry will be hard pushed to compete against highly
capable rivals. A culture change in itself will not be enough.

At
best, BlackBerry can hope to gain third place in the market after
Apple and Android, but that means beating the combined might of
Microsoft and Nokia who are slowly getting some traction. And although
we think that BlackBerry 10's user experience is possibly the best
of the bunch, we suspect that this is too little, too late and that
BlackBerry's fate has been sealed by years of inaction.

The good news is that BlackBerry has a reasonably large pile
of cash, so it doesn't matter if BlackBerry 10 is not an immediate
success - but they must start to see an improvement during 2013
if they want to survive.