How Did BlackBerry Do Everything Wrong?

Alamy With BlackBerry announcing its exit from the consumer business last week and now entertaining a bid to go private, it's worth looking at how the once-dominant smartphone maker got crushed by Apple, Samsung and other competitors in the mobile marketplace. At first glance, it's obvious that the company was too wedded to its keyboard-based devices even as new designs and technologies cut into its business -- precisely what Clayton Christensen called the Innovator's Dilemma. Looking deeper, one could pin some blame on the Canadian firm's dual-CEO leadership structure, as well as its inordinate focus on corporate customers. Its Hail Mary pass to recapture market share this year with the touch-screen Z10 and hard-keyboard Q10 fell far short. BlackBerry investors over the past five years have seen more than 90 percent of shareholder value evaporate. And the take-private bid, for its part, is far from a done deal. "In apparel you have fashion leaders. In technology, you have innovation leaders," said C. Britt Beemer, a longtime consumer analyst and researcher. Not only did BlackBerry fail to innovate, but also its executives "kept reading their own press clippings" and "did nothing to be able to go out there and defend their turf." BlackBerry's decline made Beemer recall a time when the Zenith brand controlled 60 percent of the market for color-console TV sets, "but it was shrinking 50 percent every year." The mobile company was chasing "huge contracts with companies, then one day those companies that had these large contracts made changes."