Groupon annual revenue

Here we have Groupon, the company that convinced millions of people to buy things they didn't want at prices they didn't understand, moving in almost perfect inverse synchronisation with BlackBerry's grip on the global smartphone market—as if the universe, in a fit of bureaucratic logic, had decided that for every percentage point of market share RIM lost, consumers must gain exactly one more reason to purchase discounted Thai massages in their neighbourhood. One goes up, the other goes down, with the reliability of a seesaw operated by someone who has read too much into the symbolism of seesaws.

What's genuinely interesting is that both trends track the larger smartphone revolution of 2010-2016, though they ride it in opposite directions. As smartphones became ubiquitous—particularly those running Android and iOS—BlackBerry's fortress of security-conscious enterprise users crumbled (from roughly 20 percent global market share in 2010 to less than 1 percent by 2016), while simultaneously, cheap data connections and mobile apps made discount-deal apps like Groupon viable for ordinary people in ordinary cities. It's less cosmic conspiracy and more that both companies were caught in the same technological tide, just swimming in opposite directions with equal, tragic urgency.

What's mildly unsettling is how eagerly we pattern-match when numbers cooperate so neatly, and how little we examine whether the pattern means anything beyond 'two things happened at the same time in the same era.' Groupon and BlackBerry had absolutely nothing to do with each other's fates, yet here we are, marvelling at their divorce. Perhaps this is just what correlation feels like when you're not looking too hard.