I noticed this week that Blackberry will no longer be making their own hardware. I’ve watched over the years as Blackberry has slowly declined and as a Canadian, and a former Blackberry customer it has been sad to watch. I am reminded of a conversation that I had with my financial advisors years ago. They were, at the time, recommending that I purchase some Blackberry stock as it had been doing well and they had expected the run to continue. It may well have in the short term, but in my discussions with them I explained my concerns. In my opinion, Blackberry’s competition was:
- Apple
- Microsoft
When I looked at the above 3 companies, I felt that all 3 had a bigger ecosystem than Blackberry and that these competitors could more easily push into Blackberry’s market than Blackberry could push into Google, Apple and Microsoft’s domain. I felt that Blackberry had not continued to build on their early advantage, and by not proactively locking up content deals they were doomed to lose market share in the long term.
Here we are now in 2016, and I’m pondering the similarities between Apple and Blackberry. For the most part Apple provides hardware to its customers much like Blackberry. Apple has a far more robust ecosystem and is more focused on innovation than Blackberry ever was, but if I look at its competitor, namely Google, Apple suffers from the same shortfall. Their ecosystem is not as robust as Google’s. The main differentiation? Data. Google has it, Apple doesn’t. Will I be reading about how Apple no longer makes their own hardware in the next 20 years?