It's hard to believe that just a few years ago, shares of Research In Motion
(NASDAQ: RIMM ) were trading at $144. Now they are at a miserable $23. Its easy
to point at the dominance of Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL ) iPhone and iPad as
reasons for the fall, but this is far from the whole story. The mobile industry
as a whole is growing at hyperspeed, and numerous players are showing success,
such as HTC, Samsung (PINK: SSNLF ) and even Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN ), whose
Kindle Fire is getting lots of traction. In other words, RIM's problems are
mostly self-made. And especially lately, the company has become the Inspector
Clouseau of the tech world. The latest mega blunder was the worldwide outage of
RIMs BlackBerry service. Running a massive communications infrastructure is no
easy feat, but considering RIMs big value proposition is a claim to reliability,
a three-day BlackBerry outage is unacceptable. Unfortunately, this has been just
one in a long line of serious drawbacks for the company. Here's a look at some
of the other problems that have plagued RIM: Nothing Cool A few years ago, RIM
showed with BlackBerry that it could create standout smartphones. But the latest
models have not only been duds theyve also experienced a variety of delays. A
lack of innovation can send a tech company along a downward spiral. If your
phones arent connecting with consumers, it gets tougher to find developers to
create new apps, and carriers are more likely to focus on other phones. And
since 2009, RIM's global market share of smartphones has plunged from 20% to
11%.
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