Most people have not heard of RIM, but everyone has heard of their only product the blackberry. During the 2000's this was a Canadian success story heard daily. Every upwardly mobile citizen on the planet had a berry. They launched the smartphone revolution. It propelled it's founders into the stratosphere. From a 1/2 million users of it's expensive high margin product to 80 million in a decade. People were making out like bandits on this investment too, if you bought in at 2 bucks around 9/11 you could have fetched 200 before the liquidity crisis. But for a variety of reasons, RIM couldn't keep the momentum moving. Once Apple and Google started moving in on the space quickly. For years holders of RIM stock blamed the short-sellers on the declining price, failing to see how the company failed to adapt to a rapidly developing and disloyal market.
This is one of many examples of why tech is a riskier biz than most. Plenty of potential for rewards, but also always a very real possibility of losing most or all of one's investment sooner or later, more or less permanently. There's always that risk in starting up or buying shares of any given technology-based company. GTAT is another good recent example.
The reason they failed is pretty well known, it is the same reason Myspace got crushed by Facebook. They locked out independent developers from developing software for their systems and did everything in house, which is slower, more costly and riskier. When you have 5 software developers making the same product for your system, if 2 of them suck, people will just flock to the other 3 and technology will speed forward. With Blackberry, when RIM made mistakes with their software, there were no alternatives for users to download, and people had to wait months or years for technology improvements.
After the wonderful best-in-class Motorola StarTAC, I really liked the 3 Internet-capable RIM BlackBerry phones I had over the years. The downfall for me was the screen size. Despite the screen resolution improvements, these tired eyes had trouble reading the browser and email content as web pages became more visually complex. I can't recall ever having software or battery problems with them. RIM security was (is?) the gold standard, used in many governments worldwide to this day (I think).
You are right - items related to technology is difficult to predict in terms of demand. When the pager was in fashion, the pager company offered us shares of stocks to which we obliged by buying in worth 6,000 pesos. In a year or two, the cellphone came in. The pager business was ruined and in a year's time, the 6,000 pesos face value was down to 60 pesos. Can you imagine the disaster that hit the company of Piltel?
With all of that being said, people tend to forget that Blackberry is still a going concern. Blackberry has fallen greatly from its heights and currently only trades at a small premium to its cash on hand, but the reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated. John Chen, the turnaround artist from Sybase, has pivoted the company away from it's hardware history and has begun to focus on software revenue as a driver of growth. Good Technology, AtHoc, and WatchDox are a few of the acquisitions in this space that show the pivot going on at the company. Along with all of that, the recent foray into android powered phones could provide a surprise upside catalyst to the hardware division. As old blackberry subscription revenue drops off each quarter, there is still time for the company to replace it elsewhere. The dangers of technology investing are all about the downside, but the sentiment around Blackberry is so bleak, that it already trades as if it went out of business. There is very little downside left.
It already has . . . http://www.gsmarena.com/blackberry_..._at_walmart_stock_at_year_high-news-15470.php The device also sold out on Amazon. And I suppose things will only get better for Blackberry. This does prove that Blackberry isn't dead yet and won't be any time soon.
While BlackBerry are still around and looking to make a comeback with their android powered devices, I think they have a long way to go to even start thinking of competing with the brands such as Samsung and HTC. For everything that's happened, BlackBerry still have a semi decent reputation and that is certainly something to cling on to for now.
