Mobile Opportunity

A good post from 2010 (it was already obvious to many Blackberry would fail/go bankrupt then):

http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.ro/2010/10/whats-really-wrong-with-blackberry-and.html

Blackberry's biggest mistake was blinding itself to the truth with "good financials". It was right there in front them of that they were losing the US and Canadians markets - way back in 2009, if not earlier than that. Those were Blackberry's core markets - the markets in which its brand was the strongest. And it was losing them!

But it refused to see it or accept it because at the time most of the people outside of the U.S. had barely heard of the iPhone, perhaps in a TV news story, and Android was barely a year old and nowhere close to the iPhone sales numbers.

But in those markets Blackberry had some inertia - people had heard of Blackberry from a few years back, and it was growing in popularity thanks to BBM. But the point is this was irrelevant.

Blackberry should've known that if it loses its core markets, where it's loved most, and where people had bought Blackberry phones for years, then it would only be a matter of time before it would lose the newly acquired emerging markets, too, where it's brand wasn't even that strong.

Because of this "success" in other markets, Blackberry dragged its feet when it came to building a solid touchscreen smartphone platform. Perhaps, in its own arrogance, it even thought that the success in the new markets is "confirmation" that Blackberry was…

I think you are referring to the observations of John Gapper, Michael Mace & Ben Evans...

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John Gapper @ FT:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e57abef0-cd0c-11e2-90e8-00144feab7de.html#axzz2uy4dmnOW
"The best comparison for Google seems to me not Microsoft in the 1980s but General Electric in the late 19th century – the age of electrification. Like GE, Google is a multifaceted industrial enterprise riding a wave of technology with an uncanny ability not only to invent far-reaching products but also to produce them commercially.

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Michael Mace:
http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.in/2014/01/google-conglomerate-after-nest-no.html
The idea behind the “Internet of Things” is that network connectivity is moving into almost everything. If that’s Google’s investment thesis, it could rationalize an investment in almost any industry. Appliances? Absolutely. Shipping and logistics? You bet. Phosphate mining? OK, maybe not that. But any category of products that have electronics in them is fair game, as are any services that rely on data management. That’s going to be most of the economy. If that’s the case, we’ll need to evaluate Google’s strengths and weaknesses differently. We should worry less about the overall grand plan, and more about the management structure of its businesses, the skills of its general managers, and the efficiency of the support staff behind them. In other words, will Google be more like GE or like HP?

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Ben…

More than anything else there needs to be an open source alternative to OneNote. Ironically, it's always been the least popular Office app and the most likely to be supplanted by an open source file format. Once tablets finally become mainstream I believe OneNote will be the most important in the Office suite. OneNote has the potential to replace paper; it'll be the default note taking app for students! It frustrates me no end that we don't yet have a digital replacement for a moleskin notebook.
http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2006/05/desperately-seeking-info-pad.html

(Google should have staked out a spot in this inchoate note scene when they introduced pen support in ICS, and Samsung launched the Galaxy Note, but stock Android doesn't even have a bundled Notes app much less something to compete with OneNote)

This really fascinating article from 2010 predicted and explained Blackberry's imminent demise:

http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2010/10/whats-really-wrong-with-blackberry-and.html

It's super long, but scroll down to the graphs where he shows the declining growth and margins, and predicts that Blackberry sales are going to suddenly fall off a cliff two years later, which is exactly what happened.

I'm going to be paying a lot of attention to what this guy says in future.

(For bonus points, compare these graphs to Apple's current figures -- Apple needs to add a new adjacent category soon, or they are toast. TV/iWatch to the rescue?)

This article predicted this a while back: http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2010/10/whats-really-wrong-with-blackberry-and.html

"RIM's real problems center around two big issues: its market is saturating, and it seems to have lost the ability to create great products. This is a classic problem that eventually faces most successful computer platforms. The danger is not that RIM is about to collapse, but that it'll drift into in a situation where it can't afford the investments needed to succeed in the future. It's very easy for a company to accidentally cross that line, and very hard to get back across it."

It seems to me that this is really the beginning of the end for RIM.

Based on this review and the video, it is clear that they're so behind with their tablet that they've already pretty much lost the game. The same can be said about Blackberries.

Their die hard user base is now starting to look at Android and iOS very seriously and their number of new subscribers per unit sold is constantly declining. If I owned $RIMM, I'd definitely pack up and leave.

A great article about the decline of RIM can be found here: http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2010/10/whats-really-wrong-with-blackberry-and.html