This has been a very rough week for BlackBerry. Shares plummeted more than 25% from the mid-$14 range last Friday as BlackBerry reported abysmal earnings, and the stock has continued on a slow decline over the past couple of days, closing at $9.70 on Tuesday. A new report on Wednesday from Bloomberg Businessweek compounds matters as it outlines how BlackBerry is losing the battle for the No.3 position in mobile against Microsoft, a company that currently owns just 3.2% of the global smartphone market. According to the report, Microsoft is stealing much of BlackBerry’s enterprise business, which obviously poses a huge problem since most consumers now sit squarely in the iPhone and Android camps.
“Most of our customers have been planning to support three mobile operating systems — iOS, Android and either Windows Phone or BlackBerry,” MobileIron CEO Bob Tinker told Bloomberg Businessweek. “The recent results indicate that BlackBerry is not going to be the third.” MobileIron produces smartphone management software currently used by more than 5,000 companies.
BlackBerry had little to say in response to the report, but the company did rehash the solid BES10 figures it has pointed to several times in the past. “We have seen a very enthusiastic response to BES10 from our customer base,” BlackBerry’s SVP of enterprise software Pete Devenyi said, noting that 18,000 companies have tested or deployed BES10 so far. “The adoption of BB10 has been very much in accordance with our expectations.”
