Raman Roy, chairman & managing director of Quatrro BPO Solutions, is a die-hard BlackBerry user, and on to his 6th one. “I can’t do without my BlackBerry,” says Roy, a pioneer in the Indian business process outsourcing industry. But his daughter, he says, never took to BlackBerry; she went for an iPhone-and has stuck to it.
This anecdote perhaps captures what went wrong with the iconic brand that first brought mail-on-the-go feature to mobile handsets. The market share of the one-time smartphone leader has plummeted from 14.8 per cent in the April-June quarter in 2010-11 to 1.6 per cent in 2012-13, according to data from IDC India. Even though thousands of business executives and professionals, like Roy, swear by BlackBerry’s Qwerty experience, the proprietary messenger service, or BlackBerry messenger, and the data security features, the reasons for the sharp slide in market share and the lukewarm response to its new models are not hard to fathom.
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