Anyone that remembers the 1970's probably saw a show called “The Six Million Dollar Man”. At the beginning of that show they would say “A man barely alive, we can rebuild him”. That show was fictional but the tag line could easily be used as BlackBerry's motto. There parent company Research in Motion (RIM) is counting on the new BlackBerry 10 operating system will put the life back into their once soar mobile empire.
As Phillip Redman, a Gartner research analyst, notes in a blog post: “There’s no doubt that RIM has taken a hit on global smartphone market share – especially in the enterprise where it is rapidly being replaced by iPhones. It saw its installed base decrease for the first time in history by 2m in the last quarter, but in the famous words of Monty Python, it’s, ‘not dead yet!’ ”
There was a time that BlackBerry was the number one smartphone that everyone wanted. It was so popular that it was dubbed “CrackBerry” and was the must have business tool. At its height of popularity saw a BlackBerry smartphone headed for the White house when the President-elect was constantly using one. Research in Motion, the parent company of BlackBerry, was flying high.
That reign was over by early 2010 and the once might BlackBerry started on a fast downward ride. By the end of the first quarter of 2011 there was speculation of RIM being bought and the front runner was Redmond-based Microsoft. The Redmond-based company didn't buy them and the market share for BlackBerry kept dwindling to the point that BlackBerry is hardly even heard of anymore. Now RIM is hoping the Superbowl will be able to reverse the current trend.
"A Super Bowl commercial is a great opportunity to show the re-designed, re-engineered and re-invented BlackBerry to tens of millions of consumers on the largest advertising stage of the year," RIM exec Frank Boulben said in a statement. No word yet on exactly what the ads will look like, although we're hoping for something on the level of last year's "Halftime in America" spot. "Halftime in the smartphone wars," perhaps.
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