In the past couple of decades no Canadian tech company has had more success on the world stage than Blackberry (Originally Research In Motion), Sure we’ve had other tech success stories such as Nortel and Corel, but these companies never had the lasting success of Blackberry. Unfortunately, in recent years Blackberry has been in a serious battle for survival itself. Quite simply it completely misjudged the trend toward touch screen devices and App markets for smartphones and that misjudgement has caused its smartphone market share to rapidly disappear.
A couple of years back RIM realized its mistake and made a belated attempt to enter the smartphone marketplace in force with its own proprietary operating system, BB10, a series of touchscreen devices, and a rebranding of the company itself as Blackberry. The problem was the Android and IOS operating systems were already dominating the market and that didn’t leave a lot of room for other operating systems to make a dent. The Windows mobile operating system met with the same difficulties.
Focus on Security
It might already be too late for Blackberry, but in the past couple of years they’ve taken their hardware division in a whole new direction. They’ve abandoned BB10 and adopted the Android operating system for all of their devices, while still trying to keep some of their popular apps such as BBM messenger. They’ve also tried to tackle one of the biggest flaws in the Android operating system – its security.
Blackberry’s reputation was built on secure devices and they’re trying to bring that reputation with them to their new Android devices. The Blackberry Priv was billed as a much more secure Android phone than anything else on the market and their latest release, the DTEK50 is being touted as the most secure Android phone around. It remains to be seen if the marketplace will buy into this focus on making more secure Android devices, but it’s certainly a strategy that has some promise.
