First the bad news about Sony, and now Blackberry.

You do remember Blackberry, right? They were so pervasive at one point that people would refuse to turn them off on airplanes because texting is more important than potential death. Their BBM service introduced us all to the true potentiality and impact of texting, and is actually available today for Android and iOS. In fact, for a looong time they were even referred to as ‘Crackberry’ because simply using the device was so addictive; the word was even Webster’s New World College Dictionary’s word of the YEAR in 2006! Plus, people still love that keyboard.

Unfortunately, they just couldn’t keep up with the Apple juggernaut of the iPhone, and people jumped ship in droves. Not only that, some missteps as they tried to keep their head above water really misfired, specifically the Storm, a badly designed phone with terrible advertisements to boot – I cringed every time I saw them.

Their Blackberry 10 operating system was a much better design in my opinion, much more elegant and usable, and could stand up to the competition. Unfortunately, by the time it came around it was too late; the damage to their reputation had been done, and even changing the company name from Research in Motion to Blackberry, a change I thought was a bad move because of the stigma already associated with Blackberry, couldn’t save them. Their entry into the tablet market has already been shut down.

And now, their market share has dropped to zero. As the linked article states, there were zero activations in the fourth quarter of 2013. Zero.

This is unfortunate. First, they are turning their products around, their new technology is good, and they are being held back by name alone as opposed to any real issue with their devices. Second, we need competition, and anything that hurts competition hurts us as consumers with fewer choices and higher costs.

As with Sony, I hope they turn it around. Damage to brand can be hard to fix, even if the product is good. Just ask MySpace, which is now a very well-designed site oriented around music, or Polaroid, whose TVs are actually quite respectable (Well, depending on who you talk to). But neither company can seem to break the stranglehold of their name, and Blackberry is now seeing the same thing.