Shares in the Canadian maker of BlackBerry smart phones peaked in August 2007, at two hundred and thirty six dollars. In retrospect, the company was facing an inflection point and was completely unaware. Seven months earlier, in January, Apple had introduced the iPhone at San Francisco's Moscone centre. Executives at BlackBerry, then called Research in Motion, decided to let Apple focus on the general in-use smartphone market, while it would continue selling BlackBerry products to business and government customers that bought devices for employees. "In terms of a sort of a sea of change for BlackBerry," the company's co- CEO Jim Balsille said at the time, referring to the iPhones impact on the industry, "I would think that's overstating it." Six years later, BlackBerry stock is worth just over ten dollars a share and on Monday it announced that it has formed a special committee "to explore ways to sell the company or form a joint venture with another business, among other options. This was a striking declaration: although BlackBerry has been in trouble for some time, it underwent a public "strategy review of its business plan years ago, its decision to put up a giant, blinking for sale sign suggests it has become especially desperate. If BlackBerry sells itself, the buyers biggest gains will be a pile of cash, a big portfolio of patents, and some security technology. In other words, one of the companies that pioneered the smart phone market may soon end up selling itself as scrap. BlackBerry formed in 1984 by a pair of engineering students, Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin, was for years one of the world's most innovative builders of communications products like twoway pagers and email devices. First the company failed to recognize that the iPhone could hurt it. Then it overlooked the threat of low cost competitors in Asia. Finally, and most recently, executives threw the company's remaining energy into a line of high end smartphones that failed to resonate with consumers, having arrived too late with too little to offer.

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements.how-blackberry-fell/

1.1. Performance measurement is a prerequisite for any business.

In measuring performance, managers ascertain the extent to which the operations process satisfies the formulated objectives as far as quality, service, adaptability, lead-time, cost and variability are concerned. Discuss the four (4) kinds of performance standards Blackberry should have used. (8)

1.2. Failures in business occur for a variety of reasons. In terms of Blackberry, identify and explain the different forms of failures that could have impacted negatively on its business. (8)

1.3. Discuss whether Blackberry would still exist today if it had adopted a continuous improvement methodology. (9)