Mark Lyn­der­say

Over the last fort­night, the for­tunes and prospects of two of the tech­nol­o­gy world's gi­ants stum­bled bad­ly.

For Black­ber­ry, for­mer­ly known as Re­search in Mo­tion, it was the pub­lic ac­knowl­edge­ment that its ef­forts at a mar­ket res­ur­rec­tion had failed and it was con­sid­er­ing putting out the for sale sign.

Se­ri­ous tech­nol­o­gy ex­ec­u­tives would nev­er say such a thing, they say things like "now is the right time to ex­plore strate­gic al­ter­na­tives."

Which is what you do when your ex­ist­ing plan has gone down in flames.

The writ­ing has been on the wall for some time for the trou­bled smart­phone man­u­fac­tur­er, who fi­nal­ly built and brought to mar­ket the Z10 and Q10 this year.

Both were great phones that would have done well four years ago and ce­ment­ed Black­ber­ry's en­vi­able po­si­tion as a provider of se­cure com­mu­ni­ca­tions for busi­ness and the pur­vey­or of BBM, the at­trac­tive mes­sag­ing so­lu­tion that the com­pa­ny pig­gy­backed on its serv­er sys­tems.

In 2012, the com­pa­ny shed 5,000 work­ers, cut­ting US$1 bil­lion from its op­er­at­ing costs. In its most re­cent fi­nan­cial quar­ter, it re­mained im­mersed in red ink, sink­ing un­der a loss of US$84 mil­lion.

It shouldn't have been im­pos­si­ble for a pop­u­lar brand like Black­ber­ry to re­claim some of its ca­chet, but the new plat­form it de­buted this year was en­tire­ly too much like its com­pe­ti­tion with­out of­fer­ing any of the ad­van­tages of scale.

Third place is a tough place for a tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny to work in, but fourth place is un­ten­able un­less you keep your costs firm­ly in check and have a loy­al mar­ket that loves your brand.

Once Win­dows Phone 8 be­gan to surge ahead of Black­ber­ry's new of­fer­ings to be­come the third place al­ter­na­tive in the hot­ly con­test­ed smart­phone wars, the com­pa­ny for­mer­ly known as RIM faced an al­most im­pos­si­ble chal­lenge to en­cour­age de­vel­op­ers to stick with the plat­form.

With three dis­tinct plat­forms com­pet­ing for their at­ten­tion, de­vel­op­ers were al­ready tar­get­ing iOS, An­droid and Win­dows Phone and didn't seem keen on ad­dress­ing Black­ber­ry's des­per­ate need for a com­pelling app store in time to make a dif­fer­ence to the com­pa­ny's for­tunes.

What Black­ber­ry of­fers a po­ten­tial pur­chas­er is an at­trac­tive port­fo­lio of patents and tech­nol­o­gy, in­clud­ing a wide­ly ad­mired se­cure e-mail plat­form and its BBM tech­nol­o­gy but it's go­ing to have do some se­ri­ous work to dress for the dance if it wants to court a se­ri­ous suit­or.

Steady tech­nol­o­gy ad­vance­ments have be­gun to erode even those crown jew­els in a mar­ket place that's drift­ed in­ex­orably to open, pop­u­lar ap­pli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming in­ter­faces.

To­day's smart­phone users want their soft­ware to ex­change in­for­ma­tion freely, for their doc­u­ments on Drop­Box to open in their hand­held word proces­sor of choice with­out fuss to of­fer just one ex­am­ple.

The Mi­crosoft/Nokia part­ner­ship may be in promis­ing third place be­hind Ap­ple and Sam­sung with Win­dows Phone 8 and the Lu­mia line, but that hasn't saved Mi­crosoft from hav­ing its own prob­lems.

Af­ter the fail­ure of Win­dows RT, Mi­crosoft's lega­cy free ver­sion of its new op­er­at­ing sys­tem, the com­pa­ny took a hit of al­most a bil­lion dol­lars in hard US cur­ren­cy.

Sev­en years ago, Mi­crosoft, Nokia and RIM were the kings of their busi­ness sec­tors, in­fal­li­ble and as­sured, their prod­ucts were the stan­dard for busi­ness users, mo­bile tele­pho­ny and smart­phones re­spec­tive­ly.

Nokia and Black­ber­ry have been hit par­tic­u­lar­ly hard by the touch­screen mo­bile smart­phone rev­o­lu­tion, but Mi­crosoft shouldn't be will­ing to sit too com­fort­ably in its tra­di­tion­al dom­i­nance of busi­ness com­put­ing.

While it re­mains true that no­body ever got fired in a cor­po­rate en­vi­ron­ment for buy­ing Mi­crosoft's prod­ucts, growth has been slug­gish even in its cor­po­rate strong­hold and the com­pa­ny has con­spic­u­ous­ly failed to es­tab­lish a con­vinc­ing pres­ence in tablet com­put­ing, smart­phone use and con­sumer con­tent con­sump­tion.

Many users are work­ing with the com­pa­ny's newest op­er­at­ing sys­tem, Win­dows 8, in spite of its newest fea­tures, not be­cause of them.

Next week: A look at the pre­view ver­sion of Win­dows 8.1, the much vaunt­ed fix for the prob­lems that plagued Mi­crosoft's cus­tomers af­ter the re­lease of Win­dows 8.