A SWOT Analysis of the Blackberry - Essay Example

SWOT Analysis Before 2002 the Blackberry was an ordinary two-way pager along with a thumb keyboard. Soon, it introduced the 5000 and 6000 series Blackberry and raised its market attraction with Java and e-mail features. The next launch of 7000 series included additional features such as full color screen and better web browsing. After the launch of 7100 series, the company focused the attention to capture the market of ordinary consumer rather than its past niche area of business professionals.

In its desire to create a niche area of general consumers, the re-strengthening process began with the 8000 series, offering Wi-Fi capabilities, built in cameras, and memory enhancing alternatives. The latest 9000 series has heightened the Blackberry’s strengths with the inclusion of full HTML support for web pages, the capacity to receive RSS feeds, and other superior online social networking features (Vercillo, 2010). With this graph of innovative history, a SWOT analysis of the Blackberry will show the mirror of what is in store for Blackberry.

Strengths Till now the innovative past track of the Blackberry has enabled the RIM to capture a good chunk of the American market, with 37 percent of the US market for smart-phones relatively to its next nearest rival Windows Mobile at 26 percent (Hansberry, 2009). Smart Phone Market Shares for year of 2009 and last quarter 2009 SMARTPHONES Table 1 1 - Nokia . . . .  68 Million    39% 2 - RIM . . . . .  35 Million    20% 3 - Apple . . . .  25 Milllion    15% 4 - HTC  . . . . .  8 Million    5% 5 - Others . . .

  35 Million    21% Total  . . . . . . 175 Million The above table indicates the overall market share of RIM’s smart-phones at 20 percent of the total sale of 175 million; it was next only to Nokia . A big part of this market power is from the business category of IT professionals, increasing its sales with BlackBerry Enterprise Server, as IT professionals can manipulate its features like disabling multimedia add-ons such as the camera and music player to limiting the specific websites’ user experience.

No rival so far has succeeded in providing this functionality from the IT aspect (Morisy, 2008). Weaknesses The weaknesses of the BlackBerry erupt from its stronghold on IT capabilities; the IT section of the Company is not as keen about add-on IT features as media, web browsing and others, which are nicely managed by Windows Mobile and others. It has been late in introducing the touch-screen capability (Vercillo, 2010). Not offering High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) on all models, RIM has become a soft target from the rival companies offering this capability at competitive cost on various models.

This drawback of the company policy could prove costly in the long run (Chan, 2009). The Blackberry’s network architecture since the global outage of April 2007, although it happened on a small scale can become a serious problem in future (Blackberry Blast, 2007). Opportunities The Blackberry Partners Fund can be a great opportunity for RIM, as it is being leveraged to develop downloadable applications for the BlackBerry from other companies (Gardner, 2008). This market has been captured by Apples iPhone, and the BlackBerry has not shown eagerness for this model of developing applications.

Therefore,