BlackBerry’s African conundrum

In a recent ‘intelligence session’ with a key client immedia Head Strategist & Founder Anice Hassim shared these thoughts on the future of Blackberry, in comparison to similar platforms and why it may not be a player in two to three years…

BlackBerry is popular in enterprise because of its security ecosystem and BES platform and service. In many developing countries, BlackBerry is popular, though nowhere near dominant because of telco promotions and heavy subsidising of the handsets, backed by its free IM service BlackBerry Messenger and the cut-down, web-browsing free service.

So the youth market has many BlackBerries since they love the Free IM for keeping in touch with friends and lovers at no cost in real time.

However, the million dollar question is that unless BlackBerry can mount an ecosystem challenge of the scale of iTunes etc, they cannot compete in the consumer space. They also don’t have a modern technical platform like iOS to deploy easily, The Playbooks focus on enterprise shows their strategy – to try to at least build a defensive moat around the enterprise client base and hold onto them for as long as possible.

But they haven’t a clue how to execute in a full-spectrum consumer space and no viable end to end answer. Their decision to hide subscriber numbers anticipates what the early data is already telling them – new sales to existing customers are plummeting. They are, for now, being replaced at the top by new customers funneling in through aggressive promotions on price and plans, but these customers are then running the first chance.

The reason is that in the consumer space, a switch to anyone other than RIM, HTC, LG, Samsung or Apple means an instantly amplified experience, since clients that can interact with BBM exist for the other platforms. So the cost to migrate is not expensive and the Smartphone’s WiFi capabilities and ubiquitous hot spotting now mean that the full experience is available for a significant portion of the day, even without a data plan.

And that is RIM’s problem…. Their chamber is empty and their powder wet because the war they prepared for is not the war they are fighting.

Compared to a dim experience (akin to telegraph) of the current RIM platform, consumers massively prefer the hugely amplified, if not always available, Smartphone experience or increasingly they’re getting the device from their employer because of the sensor, OS and connectivity convergence. Android (Google) as an ecosystem may offer the consumer a colour television experience, while Apple’s is clearly the holodeck in terms of roughly handicapping them in terms of consumer experience.

The enterprise lock in is not so certain either, since the migration to Android and iOS in particular at institutions and enterprising, is happening at a rate we have never experienced before.

Essentially, everybody is battling a war with PC era technology in a post PC future – except for Apple. And the network effect in things like Apps etc is now making the switch rate faster than ever.

By the time RIM has an answer, it may be too late. Shipping a RIM Android or WP7 Handset is not out of the question as RIM and Nokia are staring at the same solutions.

NB! If you would like to add to the above discussion please e-mail info@immedia.co.za – we’d love to hear your thoughts.