Blackberry and Outlook sitting in a tree...

Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind Blackberry smartphones, is in the midst of one of the greatest company collapses in the history of business. If you're interested, tech-centric publication The Verge provides an excellent overview of events. The company itself has lost about 80% of its value in the last 12 months. You don't need to be a geek or financial wizard to figure out the problem. Bottom line, people aren't buying Blackberry phones anymore. At Umzuzu we encourage people and companies to move away from Blackberry devcies as quickly as possible but rarely do they need any additional encouragement from our team - they're making this move on their own.

There are many factors contributing to RIM's collapse into oblivion. A failure of leadership will certainly be at the heart of dozens of articles, business school case studies and books written about the once iconic company. RIM's collapse is also a direct result of a technology trend called consumerization.

Wikipedia describes the concept: 

Consumerization is an increasingly accepted term used to describe the growing tendency for new information technology to emerge first in the consumer market and then spread into business and government organizations. The emergence of consumer markets as the primary driver of information technology innovation is seen as a major IT industry shift, as large business and government organizations dominated the early decades of computer usage and development.

RIM didn't build phones for the consumer, they built phones for "the enterprise" - specifically for the IT department. Little know fact, consumers and employees are one in the same. Steve Jobs and the team at Apple were extremely aware of  this and built the iPhone first and foremost for people. It wasn't IT who first introduced the iPhone and later Android devices into the enterprise - it was the business user. People loved their iPhone, a device that served them better than their Blackberry in every conceivable way. The iPad has followed almost the exact same path into the corporate hallways of businesses of all sizes. 

Consumerization says, "nom nom nom"

Consumerization is a relatively new trend in technology. The term itself was used for the first time about 10 years ago. A majority of people, especially those in corporate IT, underestimate the impact it will have over the next decade.


What's the next iconic brand in consumerization's path? My guess is Outlook.


Like the Blackberry, Outlook is usually viewed as a necessary evil, the price of working in the "corporate world". Outlook can work well depending on the amount of continuous investment the firm is willing to put into their desktop and server infrastructure. In the SMB environment, Outlook is often a primary source of user frustration, lost productivity and general IT issues. 


Microsoft also sells their Enterprise Agreements (EA's) to the IT department. But people have started to reconsider their options. They forward their messages to Gmail, they share their schedules via Google Calendar, and business units at the world's largest enterprises regularly leverage Google Docs and Sites without their IT department's help much less permission. It's just easier.


I leveraged Social Radar to conduct a quick little test. Social Radar lets me research billions of online conversations in a few seconds. Here we look at a couple of basic phrases over the past 12 months ... see an interesting comparison? 

Consumerization transfers purchasing power, and the influence that comes with it, from large businesses into the hands of the individual. I wonder what they'll chose?