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BlackBerry's Survival Plan: the Internet of Things
jfruh writes BlackBerry's smartphone business is famously floundering, but the company isn't betting everything on its new retro physical-keyboard phones. It's also making moves into distributed, embedded, and asset-tracking computing for homes, cars, and businesses, which can all be lumped under the currently trendy "Internet of Things" buzzword umbrella. The company got a head start when it acquired the QNX OS in 2010, which was intended as the basis of a new smartphone OS but which already had credibility in the embedded market.
I think it depends on the size of the company and more importantly the culture.
I worked at a much smaller company that did a very effective shift for honestly many of the same reasons. We saw the writing on the wall. Other (much larger) companies were stepping into our niche and basically wiping us out. We couldn't fight them and we knew it.
Much like Blackberry is doing, we looked at what we were actually good at, and shifted our business around them. Culturally pretty much everyone knew it was that or we were all out of work.
As the article says, blackberry wasn't always just about phones. They've got some other solid areas (not to mention infrastructure that probably makes even google drool). If their culture supports it, they can probably rebuild themselves around that stuff.
I have two family members that use new Blackberries. One has a model from about 14 months ago and my brother just got one about a month ago. They are both somewhat limited in terms of apps but conversely, they both have stupid amounts of battery life and they Just Work(tm). They're business phones so obviously they aren't getting stressed with Youtube/Netflix/etc. Still, it appears to be a solid product, if probably unsexy to the people always on my lawn.