An obituary, a Note and the fanfare

CAPE TOWN: If at the very moment Michelle Potgieter, the Director of Corporate Marketing and Communications at Samsung, brought the company's officials to the top table before the legion of journalists from across the continent, someone had brought a head on a stick as the bleeding evidence that indeed Blackberry was finished, no one would have been surprised.

Infact, the demise of Blackberry, once the unchallenged and unchallengeable force in the smartphone market in this part of the world, remained an elephant in the room, the more the Samsung people avoided the topic the more it became THE topic. At some stage, a journalist who could not help herself just had to bring it up, wondering loudly if the demise of Blackberry fortified the belief that Samsung, the South Korean juggernaut, had the African market to itself once and for all.