Management Case Study 4 BlackBerry

Management Case Study 4
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Management Case Study 4
Case Summary
The present case study is about how BlackBerry, a smartphone company, also known as RIM, made decisions that led to its downfall (Griffin, 2017). The Company boasted of its ability to make phones with strong security features, including Secure Work Space, which made BlackBerry a phone of choice for various business leaders holding various security sensitive positions. Nevertheless, the entry of iPhone and Androids threatened the existence of the BlackBerry in the smartphone market, but its leadership held that the phone had features that other companies could not compete against (Griffin, 2017). Its management refused to adopt technological changes to counter the looming fierce competition from the iPhone and Android phones. Consequently, after the introduction of these two brands, the sales of RIM dropped massively and left the company on its knees. The new companies had superior technologies, which were the choice for most consumers. They had highly responsive screens with no external physical keyboards and faster browsers. Although BlackBerry management had foreseen the dangers posed by the establishment of new smartphone companies, they acted when it was too late and their effort to introduce a phone with the high responsive screen without a keyboard to counter new threats miserably flopped (Griffin, 2017).
Question One
RIM had two distinct groups of customers, which include corporate customers who use their smartphones for official operations (Griffin, 2017). They preferred BlackBerry because of its strong security features, which would enhance the confidentiality and security of information. The other group of consumers was the individual consumers who would use the phone for personal activities such as browsing. The company found it difficult to include these two features in one phone and decided to stick to its corporate customers (Griffin, 2017). The situation put the company in a state of uncertainty because the emerging companies could include ...