There is no guarantee for success. Every company faces decisions and will make the wrong choices some of the time.

The key is to not make errors on BIG decisions that can cripple your company. Blackberry made a number of decisions early on, even BEFORE the iPhone came out that made it harder for them to change when the market changed. And then they held tightly to those decisions after.

e.g. they had huge success with Telcos and providers and had different models for different providers. This meant they had a LOT of baggage to manage and this also made it harder for developers.

They didn't create a strong 3rd party developer community to support products They didn't have great browsers. They optimized for data efficiency over user experience etc.

Once the iPhone came out and did almost the opposite of all those things, BB saw the iPhone as a consumer device and not a business device.

They felt their inroads with enterprises and telcos would protect them. They ignored the BYOD (bring your own device) trend for far too long, and their switch to modern touchscreen devices took WAY too long to complete.

In short, they weren't constantly innovating and had built a sense of invulnerability around themselves. That was probably their biggest mistake. So the lesson for companies is to always be vigilant, and listen to the market and adapt. Don't be complacent and set in your ways like Blackberry was..