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BlackBerry Hits '0%' Market Share Nearly Ten Years After iPhone Launched

maflynn said:
I think its more accurate to say how a market leader can easily mismanage its position to oblivion.
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Pretty much the same for Palm. Treo (Palm version not the Windows) had all the "smart phone" features long before the iPhone existed. Despite being ahead of the game they were gone in just a few years after the iPhone was introduced.
 
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Honestly, this news saddens me. Even though I was never a Blackberry user, I am Canadian and I have known a few people that worked at Blackberry over the years. It is a good company with good people, they just couldn't adapt to the changing market.
 
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What's a BlackBerry? ;)

In all seriousness.... Nokia, Motorola, RIM, Palm*....

All lost to a "better user experience".... i wish Apple remembered that today. Or is Apple just the new Nokia, Moto....

*Only exception to the above IMHO is Palm's WebOS OS, which i like more than iOS personally
 
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MacRumors said:



Nearly ten years after Apple launched the iPhone, which completely upended the smartphone industry, the device has effectively helped to wipe out one of its major predecessors: the BlackBerry.

blackberry-vs-iphone-7-plus.jpg

BlackBerry has at last fallen to a rounded 0.0% share among smartphone operating systems after shipping just 207,000 smartphones last quarter, following an over seven year decline from its peak market share of approximately 20% in 2009, according to the latest quarterly data from research firm Gartner.

The demise of the smartphone that was once the poster child of Canadian innovation has been a long one in the making, but one that was inevitable now that BlackBerry has shifted its focus to software and sold the global rights to future BlackBerry-branded smartphones to Chinese company TCL Communication.

BlackBerry actually continued to grow for around two years after the iPhone launched in June 2007, taking market share away from then-leader Nokia. BlackBerry's market share among all smartphone operating systems was 9.6% in 2007, 16.6% in 2008, and 19.9% in 2009, according to Gartner. Then, the decline started.

By 2011, the surging popularity of iPhones and Samsung Galaxy smartphones led iOS and Android to leapfrog BlackBerry and Nokia to form a duopoly in the smartphone market that exists to this day. iOS and Android combined for a record 99.6% market share last quarter, according to Gartner.

gartner-q4-2016-smartphone-operating-systems.jpg

Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 4Q16 (Gartner)​

Windows 10 Mobile was the only other platform to make any sort of dent last quarter, recording an insignificant 0.3% market share, according to Gartner. Windows 10 Mobile fell from 1.1% in the year-ago quarter. A group of unnamed "other" operating systems captured the remaining 0.1% share.

iOS adoption is still low compared to Android, with the platforms capturing 17.9% and 81.7% worldwide market share respectively in the fourth quarter. iPhones mainly target the premium smartphone market, however, while there are Android-based smartphones at all price points sold by dozens of brands.

What's next for BlackBerry? In addition to focusing on software, the company is also doing self-driving vehicle research, while its rumored "Mercury" smartphone by TCL will be unveiled on February 25 at Mobile World Congress.

Article Link: BlackBerry Hits '0%' Market Share Nearly Ten Years After iPhone Launched
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Another Kodak moment.........
 
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Siiigh. As a home-town boy, I rooted for them, long past when I jumped ship. The Blackberry Pearl I was rocking back in the day was still one of the very best smartphones I ever used. Yeah, they deserved what they got for all the mismanagement, but I never wanted to see them obliterated. :(
 
justperry said:
Nokia (Mobile phones branch) was much bigger than Blackberry, they fell even harder.
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While Nokia is also an example of failure of an incumbent to adapt, it feels different for RIM. Nokia was a mobile-phone player since the dawn of the technology. They grew as the market for cell phones grew, gradually. RIM was a phenomenon. They came out of nowhere with a series of devices that exploded in popularity and cultural cache. They basically created the modern smartphone category. And then they sat on their perch and laughed at Apple's "toy". And they had many, many opportunities to react to the adapting market, but they stumbled at every opportunity.
 
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Kaibelf said:
Sleeping on a mountain of cash has a way of softening the blow, I'm sure.
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I'm not disagreeing with that. But to build something to watch it be killed by something bigger must still be upsetting. They probably put their heart and soul into it.
 
RickInHouston said:
So iOS has 15% market share, in this article. Android has 82% market share, as mentioned in this article.

And, mentioned in this article, apple phone 'took down' blackberry? Looks to me like android took down blackberry.
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There was another article a while back about Apple making more than 100% of the profit (since som other companies had negative profit and samsung lost a lot of money on Note 7, so the math is actually correct).

So depends on how you look at it :)
Wish this statistic could be filtered on premium phones.
 
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Although I am an ardent Mac evangelist, going on almost 30 years now, this is still a sad state of affairs. Blackberry was once a great Canadian high-tech success story, but when the technology changed, Blackberry stubbornly refused to update its designs and operating system to accommodate the mobile internet. It's inferior web browser, plus buggy operating system were the death knells to this once "leading-edge" company. Now it'll just be a brand name like Polaroid or Bell & Howell.
 
TheAppleFairy said:
I have a box of Blackberry Classics, Z10's and Z30's, these are some of their most current phones. We are still handing them out to some people at work (old people), until our stock is gone. They suck, absolutely suck, they might have been something before smart phones, but they are crap now.
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I have the Passport now and it's beautiful.
 
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Relentless Power said:
They won't die per say, but they're fairly non-existent anymore. It amazes me where they once were and how they had a huge market for specifc clientele and the everyday consumer alike.

Part of the reason, Blackberry failed to change dynamically with the times and they ultimately ended static. They sort of remind of me of Pebble, where they also failed to innovate further.
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Nah...they won't die. They recently bought Good for Enterprise and made their way back into corporate america with GFE servers instead of BES. The think that keeps them afloat mostly is all the patents they have.
 
IMO, it is silly for anyone to think that Apple could never be in the position that BB is in now. History is filled with examples of unsinkable companies that ended up sinking like a rock.

RickInHouston said:
So iOS has 15% market share, in this article. Android has 82% market share, as mentioned in this article.

And, mentioned in this article, apple phone 'took down' blackberry? Looks to me like android took down blackberry.
Click to expand...

I think it was more of Apple's influence on the phone market, and BlackBerry's inability to catch up once Apple's style of smartphone started to take off.

While Android has a large market share, much of that are low-cost phones spread over many different phone companies.
 
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