The rise and fall of the RIM empire

A topic that has been bothering me for many months now is RIM, and more specifically, BlackBerry. RIM used to stand as an iconic front of the canadian tech scene, being the makers of the formerly incredibly popular BlackBerry line of handsets and the BlackBerry services. At some point from those glory days though the brand has hit hard times. After the recent news that the US government's procurement agency passed on BlackBerrys hit, shares of RIM closed at $14.55 on the TSX, down a startling number from it's high point of $148 as recent as 2008.

The reason that I've found RIM's decline so fascinating is that they were hailed, and still are to many people, as a major success story and the first thought when people think of technology companies in Canada. Something major must have happened for such a successful company to have fallen by so much, and it is indeed something major although a major failure to adapt to the marketplace. In 2007 the iPhone was unveiled to scores of wild buzz, people were taken by this phone and in those five years since it has come out it has shown the details that consumers wanted and the details that RIM did not practice.

RIM's inability to adapt to the times led to Apple and Android devices sweeping up and taking over their marketshare. The touchscreen incorporated in to iPhones led to openings for gaming and creative applications to be developed for the iPhone, the device that RIM launched in response to the iPhone, the BlackBerry storm, ended in widely negative reviews finding that RIM hadn't ensured that the touchscreen fit in with their OS. RIM failed to keep up with the capabilities of other devices on the market and better performing or more able phones like the iPhone swept up and took even more market share from RIM.

The most major difference between RIM and Apple that led to Apple thriving where RIM faltered in my opinion was the corporate structure in the two corporations, RIM and Apple. RIM by all accounts of employees was a mess internally, the hiring plan was to target recent graduates of universities to use for the development team and the management of these graduates was not adequate to keep the OS under control. When issues started popping up with the software for the BlackBerrys, RIM did not seem to have many answers and held to their guns with their ever increasingly outdated BlackBerry OS and the nightmare to IT staff everywhere, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, while Apple went to great lengths to build everything on a stable foundation that had worked on OS X and went to great lengths to continue improving on the software, starting from their internal tools and architecture of the mobile OS to the tools that external developers of applications for the phone used. When the lacklustre handling of RIM by the former CEOs Balsillie and Laziridis came to a head and they left the company, the new CEO, Thorsten Heins, sent a message to investors and the public, "I don't think that there is some drastic change needed. We are evolving ... but this is not a seismic change.", this remark caused the stock price to fall 9.11%.

The future is sketchy for RIM and the outlook right now is bleak but it could turn around, the new version of the OS for future BlackBerry devices is planned to come out soon and that could reverse the course of the brand, bringing back the users that departed the BB ship over their disappointment in past RIM offerings. RIM is down but not out as they could recover a share of the mobile user base, it will be hard but stranger things have happened.