BlackBerry Buzz

Once considered the go-to phone for the business elite, today BlackBerry struggles to stay above water in a marketplace dominated by iOS and Android operating systems. Three years ago, Research in Motion (RIM) held 50 percent of the smartphone market in the US; in September of 2011 there were eighty million worldwide subscribers to BlackBerry, and 200 million shipped smartphones. But with no newly released device in over a year, BlackBerry now holds less than 5 percent of the smartphone market. Corporate giants have been stepping away from using BlackBerry devices, giving the exodus heft and volume. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO, told Fortune that her company is one of them, moving “from BlackBerries to smartphones.“ “One of the really important things for Yahoo’s strategy moving forward is mobile,” Mayer told the magazine. “So it was really important that our engineers, our salespeople, really everyone throughout our whole organization really understand Android, iPhones, and, you know, Windows 8 and really get a sense of what’s happening there and how to create an amazing experience… so we decided we wanted to get everyone upgraded to smartphones.” Goldman Sachs employees were given the option to use iPhones in fall 2012. The White House, which previously used the BlackBerry for security reasons, recently started supporting the iPhone (President Obama reportedly uses his iPad during cabinet meetings). BlackBerry’s popularity has been dropping considerably, even the most loyal users are either thinking about replacing their devices, or are already carrying two devices, the secondary one being an iPhone or an Android. CIO writer Al Sacco wrote a thoughtful piece that sums up the current situation in an ingenuous manner: users love their BlackBerry devices for the keyboard, notification systems and messaging capabilities, but at the same time they are very...