When Steve Works introduced the first iPhone in 2007 , Mike Lazaridis probably had no idea that he would get the CalifornianCompanieswould hit sensitively and steal market share. But Apple convinced with a completely new design. A touchscreen replaced the keyboard characteristic of Blackberry. In 2009 RIM sold around 65 million Blackberries and had a market share of more than 56 percent in the USA.
The inventor and technician Lazaridis had the right feel for the market and predicted that cell phones with e-mail functionality would develop into a mass phenomenon. But apparently he was not interested enough in the competition, because in addition to Apple, Nokia and Motorola were also successfully pushing their way into the smartphone market. "I don't look over my shoulders to see what the competition is doing. I don't have time for that," said the Blackberry inventor in 2007 in an interview with FAZ.
The decline
But this ignorance was to take revenge. RIM lost market
share, Apple set design standards and, since October 2008, Google has been
mixing up the market with its Android operating system. Just like Apple,
Blackberry also delivers its smartphones with its ownoperating systemthe end.
But the free, operational Android software became the most popular smartphone
operating system. In the second quarter of 2014, the global market share was
84.6 percent.
The triumph of applications, or apps for short, began with
the smartphone . Developers prefer to program these small applications for the
most commonly used operating systems because they make more moneyto earnleaves.
That too hit Blackberry and accelerated the downward slide.
Too few of its own
apps also contributed to the decline of the company.
Blackberry lost massive market share and is now a niche
market. Mike Lazaridis, technology freak and creative mind of the company, had
missed some trends. Finally, at the end of 2012, he gave up his post asCEOthat
he has held since the company was founded. He was followed by Thorsten Heins
from Gifhorn. But the former Siemens manager was not very lucky. Heins had to
take his hat back in November 2013.