I disagree. The last few years of BB included touch screen devices including some with touch keyboards. My view is that had BB leaned into the enterprise security solution that made the devices popular with businesses in the first place their story might have turned out different.

> The last few years of BB included touch screen devices including some with touch keyboards. My view is that had BB leaned into the enterprise security solution that made the devices popular with businesses in the first place their story might have turned out different.

Essentially, you are saying RIM should have focused their differentiation efforts on remaining the market leader in enterprise security solutions for mobile devices, right?

My argument, which you seem to have missed is that: the market’s perception of what constitutes a mobile device and the ecosystem surrounding mobile devices had been permanently altered by iOS and Android, but RIM did not fully realize this until it was too late.

The change in perception created knock-on effects in adjacent markets like in the mobile device management (MDM) industry. Whenever there is a change in perception, the behavior of market participants will change across the board, and this is particularly observable in buyer preferences.

As you say, BB was a leading vendor of enterprise security solutions in the MDM market with BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), so what changed?

RIM value proposition was that, to get maximum value out of a BES investment, your enterprise needed to standardize ALL employees whose job descriptions mandate access to email on-the-go on BB devices. Oftentimes this meant an enterprise would pay for a BES license, MS Exchange + MS ActiveSync license on top of the costs of procuring BB devices for ALL employees that need mobile email.

With the benefit of hindsight, can you see what was wrong with RIM’s business model?

1. High switching costs. The combination of BES + BB devices translates into vendor lock-in. You cannot use BES without a fleet of BB devices. You cannot permit use of BB devices in your enterprise without first purchasing a BES license. You needed to make a two-prong investment to receive value in return from RIM’s offerings at that time.

2. High operational costs. RIM was the only supplier you could buy from as long as you are invested in the BB ecosystem. IOW, pricing was not competitive—you wouldn’t have much leverage when RIM unilaterally decides to raise prices.

The steady rise of a trend — Bring your own device or BYOD [0] —meant that lots of current RIM customers could now lower their costs by allowing employees to buy a mobile device of their choice and at their own cost (which solves problem #1) and; they could avoid the problem of vendor lock-in by evaluating lower-priced MDM vendors that support multiple mobile OSes instead of just BB OS (which solves problem #2).

An additional benefit of the BYOD trend is that the lower costs afforded smaller companies the same benefits of MDM that had been beyond their reach due to RIM’s enterprise-focused pricing, while they were the dominant vendor.

As I said earlier, there are multiple forces at play. Not only did RIM introduce touch screens, they also embraced Android as an OS on their devices, but did it change anything? Absolutely not.

0: BYOD refers to the policy of permitting employees to bring personally owned devices to their workplace, and to use those devices to access privileged company information and applications. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_your_own_device