I sympathize strongly with the people who lost their job. I don't, however, sympathize with the company that made their decision to go it alone despite overwhelming evidence that there isn't room for another platform. iOS, Android, the Web. That's it. That's all there's going to be for the foreseeable future in mobile. Even Microsoft is failing at this. How much evidence does a company need to see that their strategy was doomed?
It's classic innovators dilemma. BlackBerry could think of nothing but protecting their existing business, even with failure staring them in the face. They should have been planning more for the next phase of the company (whether that be selling enterprise servers or whatever else) and made a small, cheap, play at restoring their phone business (probably by forking Android).
"I don't, however, sympathize with the company that made their decision to go it alone despite overwhelming evidence that there isn't room for another platform."
- I'm confused. They were THE leading mobile platform. So they didn't decide to enter a crowded market. The market got super crowded and they didn't respond well. But I don't understand the "go it alone" unless you mean innovating too late to roll out a new OS that was touch driven vs BB keyboard.
They decided to compete on operating systems well after it was obvious that a 3rd operating system wasn't going to make it. Numerous companies had failed or were failing on that strategy already.
>>Even Microsoft is failing at this. How much evidence does a company need to see that their strategy was doomed?
The BB, Nokia, HTC etc problem is one of cash /runaway. Nokia was almost broke and how many $950M loss quarters can BB take? Not that many. Microsoft can keep bankrolling Windows Phones for a decade waiting for iPhone and Android to make mistakes and no one will even question them.
Aren't they losing money on Bing, and are basically break even on Xbox? I predict Microsoft will eventually give up on Windows Phone and probably the consumer market in general. The momentum is overwhelmingly against them, but of course they'll go down with the ship almost all the way. What they should probably do is maintain an Android fork.
Yes, the main evidence is Xbox. Bing is an ok example. It has a little market share where Google dominates(I think around 15% to 20%). I think they would be happy to have that in mobile.
It's classic innovators dilemma. BlackBerry could think of nothing but protecting their existing business, even with failure staring them in the face. They should have been planning more for the next phase of the company (whether that be selling enterprise servers or whatever else) and made a small, cheap, play at restoring their phone business (probably by forking Android).