One bad call after another sees BlackBerry crumble

 It was the unrivalled symbol of corporate success, worn on the hip of every chief executive and anyone who aspired to be one. Beloved of Barack Obama and also of a generation of teenagers, BlackBerry seemed impregnable. But on Saturday it announced 4,500 job cuts to a staff that has already been slashed, and admitted that it has almost $1billion worth of unsold phones in warehouses around the world. Despite price cuts, these are brand new devices that, effectively, it can't give away.

It is unlikely that consumers will see the brand loom large in high-street shops again. Just a few hours earlier, Apple had opened its doors to hordes of fans who had slept on the pavement outside its stores to get their hands on the latest iPhones. It described demand as "incredible", even though its latest products are only upgrades of existing models. Available in a gold colour for the first time, the new iPhone 5s sold out online in less than five minutes.

The Californian company has given birth not only to a whole new market for smartphones and apps, but also to a new group of people who described themselves as "professional queuers", paid to wait in line to get the first devices. The contrasting story of BlackBerry's decline - its new plan will see it focus on a diminishing niche of business users - is a parable of how quickly modern tastes and technologies can change. It wasn't long ago that gold-encrusted BlackBerrys were the hottest thing in Harrods, but today, few people want a business phone and a separate personal one.

The professional and the consumer markets have been united by brands such as Apple, Samsung and HTC, and users want to choose their own devices because they are as much fashion accessories as they are tools for work. Canada's leading global brand is not, like Nokia, approaching its 150th year, or even Microsoft's age. It has been in the public eye for just a decade, its star burning bright thanks to the advent of pagers and the need for portable email. But while it is widely acknowledged as still the maker of the best mobile phones with built-in keyboards, the market, led by Apple, has simply left BlackBerry behind. At one point, it controlled more than half of the entire US market - now that's down to 3 per cent, and most of those are not the company's new devices, but old models still in circulation. A touchscreen can do everything most people want; a keyboard is good only for typing. Almost since the advent of the first iPhone in 2007, many have felt that the writing was on the wall for BlackBerry. In the same year, the company hired Thorsten Heins, a German-born technology veteran who rose to become chief executive in January of last year. It was only then that its combative co founders, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, publicly acknowledged that while they had built the company into a global powerhouse, they were now part of the problem rather than the solution. They had focused on what they were already doing well, rather than looking at the next big thing.

Speaking to me just over a year ago, Heins even then claimed that BlackBerry was "not in a trough". The company, he said, was still growing. He pointed to its popular messaging service, called BBM, accessed by a unique pin number: "Every cab in Jakarta has a BBM pin on the door," he said.

That, however, was only half the truth: BlackBerry was built on its appeal to affluent businessmen - it was usually men - and by selling expensive software and hardware to large corporations. This was a market that wanted to get things done: to type emails quickly on a real keyboard, hammering through a large number as quickly as possible. They weren't, at least initially, too bothered about newfangled apps and browsing the internet.

As BlackBerry evolved, its phones became smaller and neater, but only slightly cleverer. Even the most traditional executive finally realised what rival devices had to offer. What BlackBerry had fundamentally failed to wrestle with was that a new generation of devices, connected to the internet, could do far more than simply email and apps. In desperation, it bought a whole new operating system, but the job of rebuilding the company almost from scratch was too hard and came too late. That fundamental flaw, however, was masked by the overall explosion in mobile devices. The number of people using BlackBerry expanded because parents handed phones to their children, and the appeal of the free messaging service spread.

Indeed, the BBM system was the tool of choice for teenagers involved in the 2011 London riots because they knew it was invisible to the police. But these weren't customers spending serious money with BlackBerry, and they certainly weren't buying expensive new phones. The company pandered to the market by developing more budget phones, selling them at a tiny profit margin. The claim was that they might manage to grab the loyalty of huge numbers of new customers in the developing world - in practice, they simply entered a race to the bottom that would inevitably be won by Chinese rivals prepared to sell phones at wafer-thin margins.

Apple, meanwhile, surged to become the biggest company in the world, its investors worried not about what it would do next but that its pile of cash was now too large ever to spend. Even though it has been plagued by accusations that it's not the innovator it once was, it has built a platform that now has so many customers committed to its products that it can afford the time to think about what it does next.

In Toronto, however, time is running out for BlackBerry. Its devices were once dubbed "CrackBerries" because they seemed as addictive as cocaine, but now the firm will announce a billion-dollar loss and retreat to the markets that made its fortune in the first place. Even if the news takes a while to get to Jakarta, the keyboard has had its day.