Pondering The Blackberry Puzzle: what IS going on here?

Just when you think you finally have figured out RIM (Research in Motion) and its Blackberry, it goes all belly up again. But at least its good to see that others, including RIM management, admit to confusion about the iconic smartphone maker.

It was ten years ago that Canadian 'beeper' maker Blackberry launched its first smartphone which had the peculiar shape, the uniquely-shaped QWERTY keyboard and was optimized for email use by busy business executives. Blackberry took the US business world by storm, soon Blackberry users were calling their device the 'crackberry' for its addictive nature. And to show how big a splash the early BB did for the world of mobile - Nokia, which was selling more than 10 times more smartphones at the time, took the Blackberry example and created its own clone, the E-Series and believed so strongly in this type of smartphone use, that it set the E-Series in its own business unit to sell Nokia branded smartphones to enterprise/business and government users.

WE ARE IMMUNE TO THE iPHONE

Then in 2007 came the iPhone and changed everything. Yes. But early on, the iPhone was not seen as a valid smartphone for business uses (early iPhones were not even technically classified as smartphones, and until the App Store came along, Apple did not let users install applications to the early iPhone, thus most business type users didn't find much use out of the iPhone if they couldn't install the necessary apps to access the corporate IT systems.) So for the first two years of the rapid growth of the iPhone, both Blackberry and Nokia's E-Series continued strong growth, almost oblivious to the iPhone.

Around that time we also started to hear increasing stories that the Blackberry was a big hit success smartphone in surprising countries, like in Indonesia, in Venezuela and in South Africa. And in those markets, it was consumers - often the youth - who took to the Blackberry. And RIM executives were quite open about it, they were baffled and quite surprised. While the QWERTY keyboard certainly played a big part in helping messaging-crazy youth to like the Blackberry, it was actually the Blackberry instant Messenger (BBM) which was fuelling that success. BBM seemed very similar to SMS text messaging but had the added virtue that any messages between any Blackberry owners (on any networks, in any country) were free. If you send two or three SMS per day, the economics will never work out. But, if you send 100 SMS every day, the savings add up very rapidly - and by late in the decade of the 2000s, youth the world over from South Korea to England to the USA, were found to have many who average more than 100 SMS per day. A ripe target audience for the 'Berry.

But the Blackberry is in a strange place. It has pretty well saturated its home market and primary target users, the corporate/business (and government) users. A survey of 20,000 US businesses by TNS in January of 2011, found that 81% of large corporations used the Blackberry and 69% of small businesses. And President Obama himself is a Blackberry user, becaue the first US president who is allowed to have a cellphone by the US secret service, the US president's bodyguards. That is how addicted he is to his Crackberry - in the tech world we like to call Obama the Blackberry President haha. You can't get much of a better endorsement of security systems and extreme utility, if your brand is the one that the US president insists on using..

But the US enterprise/business/government sector is pretty well saturated by Blackberry, it is more seeing a gradual erosion of its high market share there. The rest of the world is not as keen on selecting the Blackberry platform and in many countries recently we've seen government reaction against Blackberry (for being too secure). Meanwhile, back when Blackberry came into mobile, almost all smartphones were used by business type users. Today business-oriented smartphones count for less than one fifth of all smartphones sold and used. RIM has clearly hit its peak in this market and as the business/enterprise user base of smartphones is not growing strongly, even if RIM achieves any growth in that sector will mean a loss in market share where the bigger consumer side of smartphones is growing much faster.

So what of the success of Blackberry in India, in Brazil, in Botswana and Saudi Arabia? That is mostly consumers, and it surely reflects the right direction for Blackberry.

Yes. And I was eagerly promising that Blackberry is a sure hit last year, because I saw the early evidence of the shift from business to consumer users. From 2009, RIM has sold more Blackberries to consumers than business users and today Blackberries are sold more outside of North America than within it. That all should bode well for Blackberry.

COOL KIDS

So. We do see that the youth love the Blackberry, in many countries to absurd levels of adoption. In Canada (hardly a fair comparison being Blackberry's home market) a survey of university students found that 95% of them had a Blackberry. But lets go to the UK. A survey by Phones 4 U (UK's second biggest indepdendent handset reseller, a competitor to Carphone Warehouse) in Mach of this year found that two thirds of British youth between ages 16 and 24 - have a Blackberry in their pocket. The UK youth have taken to calling sending messages on the Blackberry as 'feeding the BeeBee' (or 'feeding the baby').

And we can easily understand why there is a sudden Blackberry surge in the youth markets around the world. Its the cool kids in class. If the cool kids get Blackberries, they will of course shift their messaging traffic away from costly SMS to free BBM. And now the 'other' kids in class, are either 'excluded' from participating in the chat with the cool kids - who of course will not pay SMS to send the other kids messages - or else the uncool kids have to get Blackberries also - just so the cool kids will agree to communicate with them. A very cruel form of class discrimination in a way, sociology and youth culture at play, but that is how kids behave. And if the cool kids suddenly adopt the Blackberry, all others have to follow suit, very rapidly. Meanwhile just today we heard from Ofcom the UK telecoms regulator, out of data from their latest findings of their annual survey, that twice as many teenagers have smartphones than adults (in the UK half of all new phones sold are smartphones). So you have the addiction of the most desirable age segment that is also most addicted to your device.

That to me was very strong proof that Blackbery has the future well in their hand. The youth of the world seem to love the Blackberry and if you have 67% market share in the most desirable age bracket, 16-24 age, then isn't the future pretty much belonging to you?

That seems reasonable yes. But why then is Blackberry in decline? Its not just that it was growing less fast than the industry (something from the enteprise/business side of the Blackberry business) as RIM has actually had declining market share from its peak of 21% in Q3 of 2009 - for the first time RIM saw an actual decline in unit sales now from Q1 to Q2, when RIM went from 14.5 million down to 13.3 million smartphones sold. So RIM declined 8% in one quarter at the same time when the market itself grew 8%. So the effective loss to RIM of its market position was 16% decline in one quarter. Thats pretty catastrophic.

It doesn't make sense to me. There is no utter failure phone. The corporate/enterprise customers buy on a steady pace, they make long term plans, they use one platform as the TBI survey from 2009 told us - 80% of US businesses insist on only one smartphone platform, obviously most of those will be on Blackberry. So if they bought Blackberries last year, they will be buying them again this year. And don't say iPhone here. Yes, the Marketing Department probably got permission to switch from Blackberries to iPhones but most other departments will continue on the Blackberry.

And if we see enormous growth in so many Emerging World countries, and the youth love the Blackberry at rates of 67% adoption rate in the 16-24 year age segment, why isn't Blackberry growing sales now?

Ah. I have pondered that a lot. And I do think I have an answer to the conundrum. I think its not the Blackberry which is the answer, it is the Blackberry Messenger, BBM. And lets first go back to the market share in the UK. We just learned in June from Kantar Worldpanel that Blackberry's market share in the UK market had grown from 19% to 22% in the past year. Now if we take the youth age 16-24 (12% of the population) away from that number, ie 8 million smartphones, we are left with 5 million to distribute to the rest of UK population. And of that, a vast majority will be corporate users. So while the youth are very loyal to the BeeBee, the rest of the population don't care for the device.

Meanwhile, why isn't 67% penetration in highly mobile-addicted youth segment generating massive repeat sales? Ah, here I think I have had an epiphany. As the solution is BBM, the addiction is not to the handset, it is to the service. And here the kicker: a five-year old monochrome screen Blackberry works just as well as the latest Bold. So while yes, the youth are heavily addicted to smartphones, they don't have a compelling reason to upgrade their Blackberry. One Blackberry is enough, it can easily be a year or two old, no problem, what the youth do - is to replace their OTHER smartphone! So they go buy the newest Samsung or iPhone or HTC or SonyEricsson and replace that regularly, but they keep the old Blackberry!

So RIM is in a very peculiar pattern, where they have strong loyalty in their two main segments - business users and youth - but neither is growing anywhere near the speed of the industry. And the evidence is pretty clear that once we pass the youth segment, the rest of the population is not in love with the Blackberry, they seem to want almost any other smartphone currently. Hence the overall decline in smartphone sales for RIM.

Again, the Blackberry conundrum is so difficult to get, that this is likely still not the full picture, but yes, expect there to be sudden surges in given countries, when the specific 'cool kids' in the youth discover the Blackberry Messenger, but also, don't think that sudden growth pattern will then repeat across the full population. The Blackberry seems very much destined to be only a niche smartphone maker and seems to have hit its peak and no sign suggests they could recover any kind of growth out of this, no matter what better operating systems or touch screens (or tablets) they were to launch.

(and just watch me be proven wrong once again right after I post this haha..)

Comments

[cycnus]

@baron
if you read this blog long enough, you'll know that tomi already answered that question many times. at start bb was a small player, so operator wouldn't really care that if bb provide another solution for SMS. whereas nokia were a big player.

[khim]

@Eurofan: fate of Nokia was decided few years ago. Not a lot of people seen it back then - but few did: Tomi'a article which explained in the end of 2009 that Android is a fad has a comment which quite literally said "Android is license free, it has multiple operators and MNO's backing it. It's reach will rapidly become very big indeed. It will overtake iPhone in 2010, it is seriously challenging incumbants; and I'd expect to see a Nokia phone running Android within 3 years (if they are still even building hardware then! ;-)"
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2009/12/us-west-coast-drunk-on-iphone-yes-but-android-is-not-the-answer.html#comment-6a00e0097e337c883301287637dd7e970c

The biggest clue comes from Tomi himself: his logic contain mistakes which are typical for incumbent - and he was "Nokia boy" for a long time so his logic is probably typical for Nokians.
1. He absolutely refuses to even think about the fact that what he perceived as a single market/ecosystem is in fact not - this phenomenon does not adhere to existing pigeonholes of "market research" therefore it does not exist.
2. The fact number 1 leads to the myopia WRT to troubles with development: he praises the features which were important for traditional smartphone buyers in Nokia phones and laments that Nokia developers are stuck and can not produce something which will ALSO be good for "new wave" of buyers - but Nokia developers are in fact doing their best in their pigeonhole!
3. He explains again and again that this sustaining approach is, in fact, correct - because eventually Nokia WILL produce something good for both "old wave" and "new wave". This is possible but unlikely (a lot of incumbents were destroyed by disruptive change which they met with the same stratgey). In the best case they will keep small sliver of their traditional market.
4. And when disruptive collapse (predicted years ago, remember) finally arrives he blames it all on "execution" (Elop in this case).

Since well-established disruptive collapse theory explains facts so well I see no need to invent some new Elop-centered theories. Nokia's platform WAS burning already and Nokia WAS already on the road to oblivion. Of course Elop's idea to put out fire with gasoline didn't help - but it just hastened the process which was well underway.

As for this Blackberry's theory... we'll see (or not see) the supporting evidence in the coming months. If BBM users constitute their own [small] ecosystem/market which is relatively immune from iOS/Android attacks - then RIM sales will drop but only to some stable level. If RIM is disrupted similarly to Nokia... they'll be in similar freefall soon (they are not there yet because at least THEIR CEO does not use gasoline in firefighting).

[Christian Louboutin shoes]

blackberry puzzle is the same as noki,I think

[Eurofan]

@Khim, I can't blame Nokia's downfall on Tomi or Tomi's blog. He is a marketing expert not a 10 man management committee. I also don't agree that Nokia's downfall was predetermined 5 or 3 or even 1 year ago; the rot had set in definitely with indecision in product planning, poor execution on Ovi, for example (I still can't figure out how to download from Ovi), throwing money away on Navtek instead of going for a license agreement, and public arrogance. You and I agree that Elop used gasoline to put out a fire, how big and how catastrophic the fire was originally and whether it extended to a platform or an outbuilding we disagree about, you and I. If Elop remained in Redmond counting profits from the MS's Office franchise and polishing his speaking style Nokia would have been out with Anna a little faster, would be flogging the E7 and N8 still with some kind of campaign with the telcoms aimed at heavy email users and consumers that want a good keyboard or a good camera, would still be facing headwinds everywhere especially China from the trend of users to go with iOS experience and would probably be facing losses this past quarter, less than under Elop, who sabotaged the sales channel. But Nokia would have all its Symbian developers still and everybody else, Harmatten, Meego, and Maemo Elop has let go. So Nokia would face the same issues Elop addressed, too much payroll for declining market share, increasingly faulty, bug filled products with rising consumer complaints and Brand weakening and difficult transition to new OS because Meego is so slow in getting out of the gate on a phone platform.

Nokia would have had to come to Elop's conclusion that full on Meego is not ready and instead released a Maemo 6/harmatten device, probably the n950 in Q1 by the latest and this would be selling as a niche product while hopefully a full on Lankku with swipe interface was developed for Q4. Nokia would start to cut back on people like RIM has done and maybe consider putting Navtek on the block. Nokia would start transitioning to N9 type devices in 2012 and hope for the best. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I think Elop will either kill Nokia or Anna, the E7, the N8 and the N9 maemo 6 experience will save Nokia in spite of Elop's best efforts and Nokia will be faced with a need to replace him to maintain coherence when WP7.5 is shown to be nothing but a long term disruption struggling everywhere in the world except possibly North America, where it might get some traction initially. One way to look at WP's high user satisfaction survey results [between iOs level and Android level] is that those very few who use WP7 like it a bunch, but they are very few, and if more people used WP7, less of a percentage of users might report liking it. I'm sure that the users of used Trabants in modern Germany "like" their Trabants, if you asked them. After all they went out of their way to obtain them. If more people experienced Trabants, less a percentage might report enjoying using them. WP has never caught on. Why should it catch on just cause Nokia builds the bricks WP is loaded into. Because it has an "ecosystem"? This is the stupidest of all Elop's stupid theories in the hand held space, that Windows Phone is an ecosystem just waiting to take off because it has all the ingredients for market success.

Meanwhile he incinerates a profitable and most widely used "lesser" ecosystem, Symbian/Ovi. If instead of acquiring Elop, the Nokia Board had kept the course and transferred some of its personnel bloat from Symbian development to fixing the Ovi customer interface, it would have been much better. As it is or was for the past year, anyone who successfully downloads something from Ovi should get a small, tin, shiny hero of the Soviet Nokia medal. The Ovi site is such a mess. That was big defect in the Nokia platform and burning it down doesn't help anything.

[John Phamlore]

Tomi,
In the United States I believe the issue was never about Skype, it's more about the war Intel has started with the carriers over WiMAX which was mistakenly initially hyped as an existential threat to disintermediate the carriers.

In my opinion the US carriers are doing their best to drive consumer Intel devices off of their mobile networks. Business customers will pay the carriers tax for data plans for Intel device access with tethering, but the data plans are deliberately structured to discourage consumer usage.

Note the past week the stories of AT&T moving to revoke the unlimited data plans of those who jailbreak their phones for unauthorized tethering.

I wonder if this animosity goes all the way back to the telecom industry being such big users of Sun's servers.

[Eurofan]

John Phamiore, Thank you for posting about Intel and WiMax. It's something I don't know anything about. Just shows how complicated things are behind the scenes.

[KARINADickerson26]

Buildings are quite expensive and not every person is able to buy it. Nevertheless, loans are created to aid people in such kind of situations.

[rizki]

Good sighting there. I keep my old blackberry (only for BBM, apparently thats the messaging platform for business in Indonesia) and yet i upgraded my iPhones and Android :-)

[Floral Wedding Invitations]

act, Nokia is doomed for a couple of years. Last fall, Anssi Vanjoki convinced everyone at E7 launch keynote, that you can forget about compatibility issues between different phone models. Qt will fix it. Some coders started to develo

[kissmyass]

Harmattan is such a big mess.

[Rino]

No Nokia Meego, No more Nokia Symbian updates, no Nokia own devices option in the market, then I prefer BlackBerry, with no Nokia OS option, BlackBerry will be the winner, untill Microsoft put his hand on BB and also destroy too :-)

[Robert]

Can't wait to read Tomi's next blast. With all the negative Nokia/MS stories this past week, he will have a lot to analyze.

As a businessman, it is fascinating to follow Nokia's attempt to abandon the global marketplace so they can focus on - the US! Brilliant move, must say. Winphone7 will save Nokia? It can't save MS, which is losing marketshare in the US by the month. Oh - all the potential buyers are eagerly waiting for Mango? More likely they are waiting for iPhone5, as are what, a third of smartphone buyers in US?

Mango and WinPhone7 may be a good platform, maybe a superior platform, but if the carrier outlets are steering customers away from them, as evidence shows, then the Nokia self-destruction story will be discussed and studied for generations of business-school MBA students.

Hell, the Amiga was a groundbreaking computer, ahead of its time, doing operations that MS and Apple would not have for years. How did that work out for Commodore?

[Tommy Men's Shirts]

This is a very informative reading. You’ve really gotten my interest on many points. I agree with most of your points and am presently examining the rest. Thank you for keeping your writing so interesting.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi all, am on summer vacation so responses are very slow, but am starting now

Hi Christian, Eurofan, John, Eurofan, KARINA, rizki and kissmyass

Christian - I don't think so. Both are in a mess but in a very different way. Nokia had (in smartphones) highly desirable products that were far too late coming to the market, so their best opportunities were wasted. Nokia's problem was execution (and recently, creeping in, quality issues too). RIM had highly desirable products which naturally do not sell with as fast a replacement cycle as the total industry, and whose market segments are no longer growing as fast as the industry. Very different problems need different solutions.

Eurofan (thanks for replying to the posting I had since removed as inappropriate). Yes, you summarize well where we agree and where we disagree. And I may not have been very vocal in mentioning it enough, haha, but yes Nokia WAS in trouble long before Elop came along, but any problems that Nokia had in the 'operating system' and 'ecosystem' - I do think the short-term fixes have proven more than adequate (Symbian S^3, Ovi store, Qt) and the long-term, you have heard me write time and again, that of those mobile phone handset makers, who currently make dumbphones, Nokia's smartphone strategy was not only the best, it was by far best-executed too (vs other makers who make dumbphones). And that in my mind, the evaluation of how Nokia is doing, should not be compared to Apple, it should be compared to Motorola, Samsung, LG, SonyEricsson etc - and how their strategies are working out in the transition to smartphones.

But yes, I do agree with you, there was a lot on fire already at Nokia - and I have also written several very long detailed pieces here how I would have fixed Nokia haha. But we also agree, Elop poured gasoline on that fire and today's disaster at Nokia has become an existential one, due to Elop's mismanagement (from February - if you remember, I agreed with his early firings, saying Nokia needed that in this economic climate and the new CEO is the best time to do it, so some of the bloat in staff for example wouldn't be there anyway in March or this Spring, even in 'my' scenario haha)

But yes, we agree in part, disagree in part, and that is good debate. I learn from your postings and I trust you find value in my blogs and probably you too, find more value from the comments here in the discussion threads haha..

Great example on the Trabant haha. I think thats possible but perhaps more likely, is that those who 'really like Windows' or 'really like Microsoft Office' etc products (like Xbox, Zune etc), will be the early users of WP7. So they are very strongly pre-disposed to like 'anything' from Redmond. Like the earliest iPod or iPhone or iPad users.

John - I appreciate it, and I always forget how intense that WiMax vs carriers battle was some years ago (when I'd speak at conferences in North America it was standard fare questions from the audience..).

But the Skype issue wasn't one until June. So we won't see any evidence of it until October-November, when the Q3 results come out and what's left of Microsoft's Windows Phone market share. But MS will by then have ridden the storm, and can hype the upcoming Nokia phones (unless Nokia is sold or Elop fired before that). I am telling my readers here, that this is a REALLY big problem for Microsoft. Yes, the carriers want a third/fourth ecosystem to run alongside Android and iPhone to make sure Apple and Google won't grow to be too big - but they will always prioritize bada from Samsung as number 3 - no harm and least dangerous - and prioritize Blackberry ahead of WP7 now because Skype is far more dangerous than Blackberry Messenger, which only does text. Skype does instant messaging text like BBM, but also voice calls and videocalls. Skype kills everything. And Microsoft has a Billion potential connections to Skype in PC Windows, Office Suite, Xbox etc. Blackberry has 100M users, so Microsoft's reach is a whole order of magnitude bigger - remembering Metcalfe's Law and Reed's Law in communication of networks. No, because of Skype, Microsoft won't ever be allowed to become the third ecosystem.

KARINA - thanks

rizki - haha, THANKS ! you are the first empirical evidence for my theory. If it was a disease and I was a medical doctor, I would be naming it after you haha

kissmyass - ok, but this blog was nothing about Harmattan, this was about Blackberry

Thank you all for writing

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Goulnik]

As it happens, BBM has been under the spotlight after the recent riots in London

see : BlackBerry to help police probe Messenger looting 'role' -- Met police claim popular, encrypted and free Messenger service fanned riots in Tottenham and helped organise looting
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/08/london-riots-blackberry-messenger-looting

While it's about the same as blaming railway engineering for helping the nazis with the holocaust, the fact is that RIM announced it would co-operate with the police. Of course it will, and this may anger those kids away from an already declining brand.

[beats by dre store]

Generalversammlung Rede Obama r?umte ein, dass der Klimawandel vor allem von den Industriel?ndern verursacht, sind die L?nder

[Jerry]

I also very puzzle.

[true religion knock off jeans]

Thanks for making my morning a little bit better with this great article!!

[world-battery]

You stated that these teens have another smartphone. Is this true of a large percentage of these teens? (If true, these are some pretty rich teens

[VogueBagSale.com]

This is my first time i visit here. I found so many entertaining stuff in your blog, especially its discussion. From the tons of comments on your articles, I guess I am not the only one having all the leisure here! Keep up the good work.