Apple goes after BlackBerry's last stronghold

Blackberry's market share already crashed in Indonesia too...This is just the band playing a new song on the sinking ship:

"But even the picture in Indonesia, one of the company's healthiest markets, is increasingly dire and the Z3 may be too little too late, analysts warn.

"The launch of this device is really BlackBerry's final stand in the Indonesian market," Sudev Bangah from telecoms consultancy IDC told AFP.

IDC says BlackBerry's market share peaked in Indonesia in 2011 at about 43 per cent and remained healthy in 2012 only to suffer a collapse in 2013, when it fell to around 13 per cent.

And Bangah said it was unlikely the new device would be BlackBerry's saviour in Indonesia.

"Do we expect a mass exodus to this device? Hardly likely," he said, adding IDC expected BlackBerry's market share to fall to around 10 per cent this year."

"Surely BlackBerry's last strong hold is people who just want to get stuff done?"

With the failure rate and general crappiness of the 9790s we've been saddled with for our current corporate contract, like a sticky-keyed, freezing albatross around our necks, I'd say there's zero chance of that.

Blackberry did once make excellent, reliable handsets that as you suggest had a focus on doing the core functionality and doing it well. Those days are long gone.

AC because, well I didn't negotiate the contract and nobody likes to be told 'I told you so',

That's just it, many people had the perception that non BlackBerry users were 'getting more stuff done' because of different features, bigger screens and such. The thing about perception is that the it is 100% true and valid for those who perceive a given thing a certain way.

That's why you have to step way, way back to get a vantage point that let's you see that very, very, few products have a universal marketing message. Good marketing keeps the target audience completely blinded to the existence of diverging, or even contradictory, messages about their products. RIM was always just gloriously bad at perception management. Was the BlackBerry a corporate communications tool or a cheap text friendly phone for kids? In truth it was both, but they failed to differentiate.

Incidentally that same thing is why it's silly when end users get into the super colorful product (x) vs product (y) debates. They've been sold a perception and it's completely true for them. It's like arguing about the existence of gravity on Earth. The only wrong answer is that there is no gravity on that planet.