The RIM situation was even worse than you describe. It was actually very similar to Nextel's earlier fast rise and collapse.
They saw erosion in their enterprise sales, but missed the fact that the superior web browsing experience and eventually applications on the iPhone was driving folks away. They honestly thought that their keyboard was still a key differentiator that folks cared about.
So they stuffed the channel in the low end of the market, and pushed the cheap text messaging of BBM as the core offering. Suddenly sketchy cell phone kiosks are pushing BlackBerries, and they became the new T-Mobile Sidekick. Just like with Nextel, that low end push tainted the brand, as thugs and drug dealers learned quickly that BBM (like DirectConnect) was initially not interceptable.
They saw erosion in their enterprise sales, but missed the fact that the superior web browsing experience and eventually applications on the iPhone was driving folks away. They honestly thought that their keyboard was still a key differentiator that folks cared about.
So they stuffed the channel in the low end of the market, and pushed the cheap text messaging of BBM as the core offering. Suddenly sketchy cell phone kiosks are pushing BlackBerries, and they became the new T-Mobile Sidekick. Just like with Nextel, that low end push tainted the brand, as thugs and drug dealers learned quickly that BBM (like DirectConnect) was initially not interceptable.