Enterprise/business is merging with consumer phones.
Their mistake was not getting into the enterprise app market for iOS and Android. They still could since the software sort of sucks still (or maybe my firm is cheap).
The reason MS made sure you could Windows at home "for free" is that it would carry to the business world (where the money is).
I find it very hard to remember something that went from business to the home market successfully.
Nobody wants their clunky office app/device to be used at home, what they want is to use their consumer app/device on the office which is usually better and easier to use.
The Personal Computer.
Remember that mainframe you have at work that can crunch right thru spreadsheet numbers? Now you can have that same convenience at home. And this one can play Frogger too.
Although I can't talk about enterprise and business users, I was involved in a project targeted for government that, if released, would have made the Storm look elegant in comparison. The expectations of the government around the time of the biggest iPhone growth was that government contractors need to make hardware the same price as the iPhone, but meeting fairly stringent MIL-STD-810 standards.
Not only are devices aimed for government purchase going to be sold in smaller numbers than consumer devices, they have higher environmental standards (drop it in jet fuel and have it survive, let it sit out in a sandstorm, etc.).
Fewer sales and more requirements means higher costs, not lower, and the government was happy to simply buy five iPhones instead of buying one device that would probably cost 5X the cost of a single iPhone, and still get pretty decent lifetimes out of them.
Government/military users of course have long been accustomed to using whatever device wins the RFP, but even there the change in how people use mobile computing devices had to be felt.
The only way they could have survived was if they had started 5 years before and came up with the iPhone themselves, which wasn't going to happen. Faced with two bad paths, the path I would have liked to see them take is to accept defeat and organize the slow windup of the company over the next 20 years, returning as much cash back to the shareholders as possible. But good luck convincing a CEO to ever do that to their career.
And, obviously, their phones should run Android.
A low priced Blackberry with a nice keyboard for messaging and a decent camera to go along with the horizontal screen would have staked out an area. Making deals with pay-as-you go groups would have gone into an area Apple didn't go and Blackberry might have dominated. Horizontal screen and camera could be an advantage.
They tried to build an iPhone not a Blackberry.
It's worth noting that Apple is in the same position today as RIM only 10x or 50x larger but still vulnerable to a brand new device upending their entire company.
I can't imagine it happening. Enterprise IT isn't isolated from the rest of society (although it sometimes feels that way). When the rest of the world moved on to touchscreens, Blackberry would have been left behind anyway.
The Storm was rushed out, as the article says, in part because RIM thought it had to compete where I don't think it had to compete. Now I'm no savvy analyst, but it seems to me like RIM got tricked into picking a fight on Apple's terms and lost terribly.