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Research in Motion the Communication Challenges of Blackberry SAINT MARTIN’S UNIVERSITY Research In Motion The Communication Challenges of BlackBerry Josiah Shelman & Sommer Valles 12/9/2013 When Mike Lazaridis began college, he started making wireless, programmable displays for advertisements. His economics professor convinced him that he had a great business idea and encouraged him to start a company; in 1984 that’s exactly what he did. He started the company with his long-time childhood friend and fellow engineer, Doug Fregin and named the company Research In Motion. Business started out slow as they only sold 100 units of their first LED signs, but soon Mike shifted his focus to wireless telecommunications. In 1992 he hired Jim Basillie, a Harvard MBA graduate and future co-CEO of RIM, to help with the business side of the company. RIM really hit its stride in 1996 when they developed the first two-way messaging pager. From then on RIM continued to pave the way in telecommunications and released their very first Wireless PDA named the RIM 950, which later became known as the Blackberry. RIM has been fighting to stay competitive for the past decade. They have faced many communication challenges, both internal and external to the company, that have led to their decline. Those failures include: lack of two-way communication, lack of leadership, and failures in its internal communications. Internal Communication RIM has been on a drastic decline for the past few years and a major factor has been the lack of internal communications. The CEOs, upper management, and board members have continued to disagree and cannot come to a conclusion on what direction the company should head. Thus in essence the company has continued to fall behind and at this rate will not be around for much longer. IPhone called, no response On January 9th 2007, Apple released the revolutionary product called the iPhone. It was one of the first phones that used a touchscreen instead of a keyboard. It had many new and exciting features that offered a lot more to consumers than just email. RIM failed to see Apple as a legitimate threat and it wasn’t until November of 2008 that they offered a true response with the BlackBerry Bold 9500. Instead, CEO Mike Lazaridis did not listen to the market but focused on the miniscule details of the blackberry. Lazaridis was even quoted in a meeting say that “There will never be a BlackBerry with an MP3 player or camera.” Co-CEOs Could Not Agree As RIM started to decline, so did the relationship and communication of the two CEOs of blackberry. Lazaridis and Basillie were always known to have small arguments behind the closed doors of the conference room, but the more trouble RIM got into, the more the CEOs bickered. The fights began to spread out of the boardroom and into the hallways of the main campus of RIM. One of the main issues was that Lazaridis would and could only focus on security, battery life, and network performance, while Basillie wanted to shift the focus to instant messaging software. According to Jonathan S. Geller, Author of Inside RIM, “Mike is convinced people won’t buy an iPhone because battery life isn’t as good as a BlackBerry” (Geller, 2011) . This thinking was exactly the opposite of what the consumers wanted and the market proved this. Customers are looking for the next big thing, not increased battery life and security. Lazaridis and his top executives could not agree. Another strong issue was that, “Chief Marketing Officer, Frank Boulben, and Chief Operating Officer, Kristian Tear, dismissively told Mr. Lazaridis that the market for keyboard-equipped mobile phones – RIM’s signature offering – was dead” (Houpt, 2011). Even upper management was afraid to bring up new and fresh ideas in the company. An article was published saying “Sometimes, feedback from customers that might inspire changes would die at middle management, because senior executives didn’t want to bring it to Mr. Lazaridis” (Hartopo, 2012). Lazaridis and his executives could not agree on what course of action blackberry should take, and because of this many executives began to leave. The Lost Executives As RIM declined many top executive began to resign from their positions at RIM and look for employment elsewhere. Blackberry had 6 top executives leave within the period of one year. Timeline: Resignation of RIM executives • March 4th 2011 - Keith Pardy, Chief marketing officer • June 17th 2011 - Brian Wallace, vice president of digital marketing and media • July 19th 2011 - Ryan Bidan, senior product manager • July 25th 2011 – Don Morrison, COO • August 31st 2011 - Mike Kirkup, head of developer relations • September 29th 2011 - Tyler Lessard, vice president for global alliances and developer relations Both Brian Wallace and Ryan Bidan left and joined Samsung mobile. Another executive that left not long after was Chief Technology Officer, David Yach. This rapid loss of executives had drastic effects on Blackberry. It forced the company to function with a severe lack of leadership. Blackberry also had a lack of organization and development. Its stock also continued to decline, as investors did not like the sudden loss of so many executives. Blackberry completely lost the core of their leadership and creative structure. With the loss of so many top executives in such a little time, it was hard for Blackberry to maintain its level of efficiency. The Blackberry 10 In order to try and get back in the market and deliver a total market iPhone killer, RIM began research and design of a whole new phone that would be called The Blackberry 10. But before designing the Blackberry 10, RIM had to figure out a strategy. They had to decide whether or not to start new with the Berry 10 or to work off of the old Java based applications. After almost a year of discussion RIM finally decided to start from scratch with the Blackberry 10. The problem with creating from scratch was that RIM had to bring in a whole new team for the Blackberry 10 because the original designers were busy working on the blackberry 7. Once again RIM failed to communicate with one another effectively and was being pulled in too many directions at once. Because the company was split, one former senior executive said, “To me, the most logical thing would have been to integrate the operating system organizations into one, Then you’d have a whole team, not 150 people sitting around saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do next,’ and another 150 people saying ‘I’m over my head’” (Sean Silcoff, 2013). Another division on the Blackberry 10 was whether or not to have an all touchscreen or keyboard phone. The original plan was for it to be a touchscreen phone, but some senior executives wanted to stick with the so-called “bread and butter” of BlackBerry. After more talk and postponement, RIM decided to continue the making of a touchscreen phone but released a keyboard version shortly after. By the time that the Blackberry 10 line of phones were released in January of 2013 many people believed that they were two years too late. Because of RIM’s slow response time and lack of unity, they allowed Apple to gain a huge share of the market. CEO’s to CEO In January of 2012, both co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis resigned from their positions and are being replaced by the COO of RIM, Thorsten Heins. Even though Balsillie and Lazaridis deny that the reason for their resignation is due to shareholder pressure, no one really believes them. However, both Balsillie and Lazaridis will stay on the board and retain a large amount of the RIM shares. External Communication Failures RIM faced a couple external communication failures throughout the life of the business. There is one main failure in this category that we can see: lack of two-way communication. RIM failed to listen to what the consumers wanted and they failed to communicate when they experienced a problem. Listen to Consumers: RIM had a huge problem listening to consumers. Originally they focused only on the business sector as their target market, but they made a costly mistake in that. They didn’t realize that people would want mobile devices for personal rather than business use. It was pretty obvious to other businesses, such as Apple. They were prepared for this shift and thus they stole the market and gained much success. RIM on the other hand suffered a loss in sales and bad publicity. Even after it was obvious that RIM needed to change their target market, they were slow and ineffective. Their mobile/personal devices consisted of poor technology and completely ignored the features consumers desired. They neglected that touch screens were gaining support, and they were too stubborn to get rid of their full keyboards to answer the consumers’ desires. Apple released their first iPhone in 2007. They sold 6.1 million over 5 quarters. This phone was such a hit because of its touchscreen and consumer-friendly design. Steve Jobs was quoted to have said “The phone was not just a communication tool but a way of life” (Oliveira, 2013). Even though RIM saw the success of the iPhone, it took them almost 2 years to respond with their own touchscreen phone, the BlackBerry Storm 9500. RIM also failed to include apps on their devices, which the iPhone did. Apps were gaining in popularity for several years, but RIM was too prideful to jump on with the fad. They chose to ignore adding them to their devices and as a result they lost even more customers.
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