BlackBerry company fail Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

BlackBerry company fail - Essay Example Blackberry, the Ontario-based smartphone company, had opportunities to survive and adapt but it took the wrong direction. U.S President Barack Obama was quoted saying that one of the things he was addicted to was his BlackBerry. One of his reasons was that the phone had advanced security features (Herman, Hadlaw and Swiss, 2014). The company was started in 1984 by engineering students Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin and was for a long time a global leader in communication products. This was until it failed to see the impact of the iPhone, became blind to competition (especially from cheaper Asian rivals), and delayed in launching new phones. Despite being named by Fortune magazine in 2009 as the world’s fastest growing company, BlackBerry dropped a plan to be acquired for $4.7 billion and laid off its chief executive. This is in contrast to Apple, where Steve Jobs managed to turn it round through adaptability after being 90 days from the verge of bankruptcy in 1997 (Kint, 2014). Success and failure in the technology business are rarely predictable. BlackBerry had an obvious lead in the market, and its managers discussed various ways of coming out of the predicament but in the end they made the wrong choices (Rao and Klein, 2013). Basically, they did not fail to adapt, but they made the wrong adaptations. Long time survival is about making the right adaptations. In the book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Financial Time’s columnist Tim Harford stated that, â€Å"success comes through rapidly fixing our mistakes rather than getting things right the first time† (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson, 2014). The Globe and Mail of Friday 27th September 2013 investigative report revealed that Verizon asked Blackberry to create a touch screen but the result was a failure leading Verizon to turn to Motorola and Google (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson, 2014). In 2012 BlackBerry’s CEO Jim Balsillie quit the