It was once the king of the boardroom – the essential accessory to every suit. But BlackBerry is having a torrid time of it now and is continuing to suffer a fall in fortunes which its owners are struggling to arrest.

The company that makes the phones, Research in Motion, has just announced, in market guidance which shocked analysts with the scope of its negativity, that its revenues fell by a massive 70 odd per cent, year on year, for its most recent reporting quarter. One of the biggest factors in this was that it had to drop the price of its PlayBook tablet after poor sales, which have deteriorated progressively this year to 150,000 last quarter.

What’s more, while admitting its disappointment at the 11 to 12 million mobile handsets it expects to sell in the run up to Christmas (around 25 per cent less than last year), the word is that much needed release of its next generation devices – the touch screen BB10 smartphones – won’t now be ready until the end of 2012.

To top it all off, it’s going to take a while for people to forget the farce of a few weeks ago when Research in Motion’s servers failed, curtailing BlackBerry Instant Messaging for three days.

So is it the beginning of the end or can BlackBerry turn it around? The Canadian company’s executives seem up for the fight. "It may take some time to realise the benefits of these efforts and the platform transition that we are undertaking, but we continue to believe that RIM has the right set of strengths and capabilities to maintain a leading role in the mobile communications industry," said co-CEO and marketing specialist Jim Balsillie.

But Research in Motion must surely be looking at its flailing competitor Nokia with a grim sense of trepidation. For the BlackBerry is much closer to the Finnish firm – undoubtedly the fallen giant of the mobile industry – than it is to those that are currently setting the pace.

On sales figures alone – though these don’t paint the entire picture – BlackBerry will sell 38 million units across its portfolio of 37 handsets (Gordon Ramsey would probably suggest trimming the menu down) worldwide this year, if it meets its downwardly revised target. This compares to 72 million iPhones and more than 300 million Samsungs. Nokia sold 58 million smartphones in the first three quarters of 2011 but has extreme debt pressures and its devices sell – in the main – for considerably less than its competitors’ models.

Nokia originally and for a long time had the consumer mobile market licked. Blackberry soon took over the business share. But both now have fallen significantly behind the pace set by the iPhone and the leading Android devices in both markets. The latter two’s products are slicker, more ubiquitously engaging and just generally more aesthetically and technologically appealing than anything the two former heavyweights can offer. People are still developing apps for BlackBerry but you’d wager that the priority list for most developers has the iPhone and Android first.

The problem is that people began to reject the notion of separate devices for home and work, as my colleague Dom Pollard wrote about recently. Consumer trends lead technology, business follows. People look to bring the functionality they use at home into the workplace rather than the other way around, and they want to bring the phone they use at home into work. Therefore,. You can’t get the business market if you don’t have the consumers.

The hot devices of the year – surely the iPhone 4S and the Samsung Galaxy Sii – are chiefly marketed form a home use perspective but they satisfy both needs with aplomb. Not only are these phones intuitively easy to set up and operate, they both securely offer cross compatibility with a wide range of major services like email and calendars, effectively encroaching upon the unique selling point that BlackBerry had. 

Apps, aesthetics, usability and hype are the key to the iPhone’s success. Android is a similarly story (literally, considering the lawsuits that have gone between Apple and Samsung relating to intellectual property). In addition, the rise in Google Apps around the workplace – itself an extension of a boom in consumer take up – helps to make the search engine’s operating system an attractive proposition.

BlackBerry did make the transition to the consumer market – apparently by accident as much as design. It’s BlackBerry Messaging System – which allows users to send messages over an Internet network to other BlackBerry devices for free – was a big hit among the thrifty youth, who could reduce the text messages they needed in package bundles or still communicate once running low on credit, if operating on the pay as you go model. And mass market appeal of the BlackBerry rode strong for a time, perhaps also buoyed by the clever marketing ploy RIM compounded in separating itself from the rest of the market. Nokias, Sony Ericssons and Motorolas were phones; a BlackBerry was – and remains, but perhaps to a lesser degree – a BlackBerry. There is no doubt that Apple took inspiration from this and it has implemented the strategy with a similar degree of success.

But BlackBerry never pushed the point home and it now has to refocus on the consumer appeal with a whole new offering. It could take a leaf out of Apple’s book. Though the late Steve Jobs’ now iconic company enjoys a reputation of being something of a revolutionary, appropriation has been a big part of its success. Take the iCloud for instance – though heralded by Apple and its evangelists as something just shy of the second coming, there’s nothing that’s really new there; it’s pretty much just the cloud-based music streaming application Spotify, the cloud storage facility DropBox and Google’s interconnectivity features all rolled into one.

While markets clamour for something new and exciting – and BlackBerry now undoubtedly requires major brand repositioning – you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel; take what others are doing and do it equally as well and you could just be OK, as long as you can paint it up as something new. 

So that will have to be the first thing to concentrate on for BlackBerry just to get within touching distance of the big boys. Then, if it does achieve it, it may be able to re-establish its standing in the business market, presuming that is still its aim.

There are real opportunities available for enabling people to interact intelligently with their business systems through their phones and tablets. This is a development much touted but relatively untouched so far. Most business users use their mobile devices for nothing much more than email and office applications, from a commercial context. BlackBerry’s heritage reputation within the business world could mean it has the traction needed to make a concerted push towards making true mobile operability of business critical systems a reality.

It will need tie-ins with the big business IT companies – IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and such – but if it can make itself indispensable to the business world, allowing executives to either change the course of day-to-day business operations at a button’s push, or to work with big data tools and cloud-based storage on the move, then it may once again become a big player.

According to recent research, there are still 29 million people in the UK alone that still don’t have a smartphone and this means there’s still a good opportunity for a rival to Samsung and Apple’s dominance.
It’ll certainly be difficult without its new smartphone though – while the RIM executives are positive about their ability to push the existing portfolio until the messiah model arrives late next year, the term ‘flogging a dead horse’ springs quickly to mind.

And even when it does release the new model, finding public favour will be no sure thing. BlackBerry’s proposition – like any other mobile maker looking to break the dominance of Apple, Samsung and, to a lesser extent, the likes of Nokia, HTC and Sony Ericsson – is to be the same but be different; try to nab the business market but concentrate on consumers. The mobile world is one ripe with contradiction.

Unfortunately, the damage suffered to BlackBerry credibility through the recent loss of service – rumoured to have been caused by old servers in need of upgrade which didn’t have scalability functionality – could be damning to any push back towards business focus, even more than from a consumer perspective. As we found recently in our 2nd Cloud Circle Industry Trends Report, uptime and performance are the most important things people look for in a technology supplier. The old saying goes ‘three strikes and you’re out’ – BlackBerry will have to hope that it didn’t use up its three over a disastrous period this year.