11 February 2016
Blackberry in International Markets Summary Research in motion (RIM) a company based in Canada made the blackberry smart phone back in 2002. Originally Blackberries were only sold to businesses int he UK, US and Canada but as the market for this product took off Research in Motion expanded worldwide. Rim did not know that the key global selling point of it’s smart phone was the built in encryption. This encryption caused issues in the countries of Asia due to the guarantee on the customer’s privacy. In the middle east the UAE asked Blackberry to provide them with a means of decrypting and seeing the messages sent between the Blackberry devices. The UAE believed that completely private messages would be used for evil things, for example the peaceful protest organized between youths. After RIM refused to provide that the UAE used state owned cellphone company to encourage users to install software that turned out to be spy ware. After the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh the UAE speculated the guilty used Blackberries to communicate and announced it would ban blackberry. A couple days before the ban on Blackberry services the UAE announced it reached an agreement with RIM. India threatened to ban Blackberry if RIM wouldn’t let the Indian government access the Blackberry Enterprise Servers. This was hard for RIM since they advertised nobody, even themselves could access messages sent through Blackberry Messenger. Hundreds of businesses relied on these technological promises. India citizens grew concerned when terrorists used blackberry phones to kill 173 people and the government could not access those messages. RIM gave in and let the Indian Government tap into Blackberry Messenger messages by setting up a local server in that country. Some people are curious as to why this was only an issue in the east and why the controversy did not lead into the west. Analysts believe that is because the western governments have the needed technologies to crack the encryption while countries like Dubai do not. RIM kept to themselves on whether or not they gave any governments special access to their technology and messages and told everyone that they did not. Human rights organizations world wide condemned governments that threatened to ban Blackberry without special access to messages. Blackberry critics opined that if a terrorist wanted to plan an attack they would do so without an expensive device such as a blackberry and there are other forms of communications for them to use.
In conclusion Blackberry should have looked at encryption and seen how it affected other countries int he past before broadening it’s horizons. They should have developed a backdoor system to cater for the eastern countries.

Questions
This controversy is prominent in Asia and the Middle east because the governments of these ares aren’t as technologically advanced as the west and cannot crack the message encryption.
RIM could have implemented a way for the governments of the east to access the messages. Either that or they could have fueled the controversy by proving that their product was not the reason these attacks went unnoticed and that there is no reason for the governments to need access to the messages.
One lesson RIM leaves for the global technological MNC’s is that they should do their research on how newer technologies effect eastern countries. If RIM looked up the previous incidents on t