I read this article from Dan Lyons about switching from an iPhone to an Android and the news about the Android outselling the iPhone in the US and looked down and my blackberry and laughed.
Don’t get it twisted, I really like Google and respect the Android OS, I love Apple and love working on a Mac and am itching to come up with a reason to get an iPad. But I’m pretty stuck on the blackberry.
Why? Simple. Blackberry does one thing really really well. The Blackberry messenger (BBM) feature is whole heap of awesomeness. A lot of my friends are on crackberries and the fact that we can message internationally in groups for free wherever we are has a whole lot of other people hooked. Not to mention university students who love to use the BBM with their friends and family across the world.
Sure Blackberry does a whole lot of other stuff well, emailing with a proper physical keyboard is nice, and for business email management it’s a great service. But for me it’s BBM that keeps me as well as a lot of other people hooked. So much so that the Blackberry still outsells the iPhone and Android handsets in most markets – in the US last quarter, iPhones had 21%, Androids 28% and RIM 36% of all smart phone sales.
The lesson here is to do one thing really really well. Most companies that are really successful do one thing absolutely, phenomenally well. Google does search really really well, this gives them license to develop and build other great things like maps and mail. Facebook makes it simple to share stuff really well, it’s not the best picture sharing sight, it’s not the best for updates or events, but because it does sharing this content really well it enables them to do events and photos etc and get traction in these other areas.
So when starting something, make sure you have one feature that’s absolutely fabulous that makes it difficult to compete with and this will help grow and maintain your market share.
