Too Many BlackBerries
By Harry McCracken | Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 9:24 am
In a New York Times story by Ian Austen, RIM says it’s not sure how many different BlackBerry models it sells:
Features have proliferated on BlackBerrys as part of RIM’s move to the broader consumer market, and so have the number of models. Since 2007, RIM has introduced 37 models. The company, in a statement, said it did not know how many models were on the market.
The company with the most phones doesn’t win; the ones with the best phones do.
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5 Comments For This Post
December 17th, 2011 at 11:29 am
RIM sounds like mid-1990s Apple. Remember when Steve Jobs stepped in and reduces the product lines to a 2×2 matrix? Consumer vs professional and laptop vs desktop. I could see RIM doing the same thing, only with touch screens vs keyboards.
December 17th, 2011 at 6:42 pm
Whether most or best, the company who can't answer how models it makes is in deep, deep trouble.
December 18th, 2011 at 5:26 am
"The company with the most phones doesn’t win; the ones with the best phones do."
Wins what?
December 18th, 2011 at 5:54 am
The idea that BB is dead because they have too many choices is absurd. The problem isn't that they sell 37 different models (or who knows how many) but rather that they sell 37 POS that are all pretty much exactly the same and many years behind their competitors in every aspect. If Apple sold 37 different models that were all great they'd probably still "win." In fact, Android is "winning" and there are 100s of different models and most are far from great.
RIM is a just a walking embarrassment to itself and everyone associated with it. Rebecca Black levels of horribleness as seen with their recent in-flight "entertainment."
December 19th, 2011 at 8:50 am
Being a Finn, it was (once upon a time) basically the default choice to buy a Nokia (this was way before feature phones). Usually the choice was simple – a handful of models to choose from, differentiated mainly by size and price.
Much the same differentiation principles ruled the world over.
Note: Although Nokia always had trouble in the US (and it was not due to the hardware), Nokia used to OWN the european market.
You got used to judging a person by the phone he was using (older/newest, size, style etc.) and you did not need to be an aficionado to be able to visually identify a phone from five feet away.
I started seeing trouble for Nokia in 2007 or 2008 when I needed to get a new phone for my wife – headed to the Nokia site and started to browse the plethora of models (some 60+ at that time). In the end I had to make use of the "select me a phone based on my selections" -feature. It turned out to be the last Nokia in our family.
You can blame Nokia's downfall on an ancient OS (which is true), but basically even that was a symptom of their abject and utter loss of focus.
Nokia's attempt at a comeback with some help from Redmond seems to have failed. The only thing Nokia has left is probably the world's biggest patent portfolio and the best RF-engineers in the world. But designing a successful consumer product for the 10's is beyond them.