The perils of a dated platform

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Blackberry users are fleeing the sinking ship - Data from Enterprise Management Associates (hat-tip InfoWorld) shows that 30% of users at companies with > 10K employees will end up ditching their Blackberrys.
I'm not exactly surprised - a huge percentage of Blackberry users that I know walk around with 2 phones (usually an iPhone :-) ), and given the increasing popularity of Bring Your Own Phone (BYOP?) at companies, I expect the dual-phone types to rapidly ditch their Blackberrys.  And this isn't just me talking - the Economist went into gory detail on this recently.

So whats the underlying issue?
You hear the usual suspects - outages, slow pace of releases, tone-deafness at the top, etc., but the real issue is quite simple - the platform is passé.

Technology progresses in fits and starts - an interval of steady growth is interrupted by sudden spurts of (disruptive) innovation.  You've probably seen some variation of the disruption curves above (hat-tip ca-blog).  New tech is usually under-estimated, as the effort necessary to achieve lesser performance is greater than with the old tech.  However, the performance ceiling is much much higher, and pretty soon the new tech has far outpaced the old tech.

To translate this to Blackberry-world, RIM stayed put as the world changed (disrupted!) around them, and consequently got caught on the old tech end of the technology curve.  They then spent the last few years incrementally updating their existing tech to little avail.  To add to their misery, the friction associated with switching phones has been decreasing steadily - with the average user holding on to a cellphone for only 18 months.  Its no surprise that BB is losing market share, its only surprising that its taken this long.

The bottom line - be aware of your platform, and do not get caught on the wrong end of a disruption...

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