What could do to prevent falling Blackberry - I am Entrepreneur

There is some doubt about whether Blackberry is a brand in danger. A week ago it was announced that the company would lay off about 40 percent of his team due to a loss of U.S. $ 1,000 million in the last quarter.

Far from the days when Blackberry was the position dominant in the emerging smartphone market, in recent years the company has struggled to keep some in a sector dominated by Apple, Samsung and other Android devices. Today, Blackberry has only 3.8% market share in the United States, unlike the 43% it held in January 2010.

Considering the fall of a brand as iconic, clearly the question is what could have done differently . Are there tactics that used in previous years had managed to avoid the collision of Blackberry?

After monitoring more than 500 wholesale markets in recent years, examining what distinguishes that last of perishing, suggest that there at least five things that Blackberry could have done differently and that would have allowed it to remain competitive. You can:

1. Have been willing to accept new hardware formats
Although the full QWERTY keyboard has become the key feature of Blackberry, it is clear that the company took too long to release a touchscreen device. While the rest of the market was fleeing integrated keyboards, Blackberry stalled tested and formatted quickly lost appeal to a new generation of consumers.

Naturally, the deviation in the past would have made Blackberry lost to some of their existing fans and eroded its value proposition in the market. However, letting go of this design was a critical step for the future. As Steve Jobs once said, “If you’re not willing to cannibalize your own product, someone else will.”

2. Recognize before the desires of consumers were changing
In the early days, Blackberry gained traction thanks to the robust security tools, such as email solution company. While this worked well in the corporate market, Blackberry failed to recognize that the features were gaining relevance sexy on software security in the mind of the average consumer.

As the role of smartphones has mutated more functionality beyond the simple phone, Blackberry stalled in selling functionality increasingly mattered less to consumers.

3. Do more fundamental changes in the operating system Blackberry
remained too safe for long. While rivals vastly launched new operating systems for their devices, each release of Blackberry was an improvement from its predecessor.

In this there are lessons for other smartphone makers like Apple. Evolutionary change is not sufficient in the field of technology, but it moves quickly. The revolutionary innovation is needed to stay ahead of competition.

4. Be more open and flexible
Blackberry rules and restrictions for the development of applications were recently described as “draconian” by an influential person in the industry. This strategy dissuaded rigid and restrictive external innovation and resulted in Blackberry being overtaken by Apple and Android smartphones that were led by applications.

5. Recognize the change
The company could have better recognized threats involving change ‘Bring your own device’. While Blackberries were once the first choice, when employees began to bring their own devices in the late 2000s, Blackberry executives were alarmed.

But despite this, the CEO of the company, Jim Balsillie, dismissed their concerns, saying that not worth it, an error in judgment that cost a lot to the company. If Blackberry had heeded this change rather than ignore it, could have taken action to mitigate the damage.

Although a world without Blackberry would have been inconceivable a few years ago, this possibility every day becomes more real. Like Nokia recently agreed to join with Microsoft to avoid failure, Blackberry will have to make very difficult decisions in the coming months to survive.