The penalty for being late — really late — to market is almost always more severe than a company wants to admit. Especially a company that had a firm grip on a large piece of the market, like BlackBerry (NASDAQ: BBRY).

In a recent telephone survey, brokerage firm Raymond James asked people which smartphone they would never consider buying. That may be kind of an odd twist on the typical survey, but the results are clear: about 20% of respondents said they would never buy an iPhone from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL); about 31% said they would never buy a phone that uses the Android operating system from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG); and about 71% said they would never buy a BlackBerry.

Thinking about the reasons for the outright rejection of BlackBerry leads to a couple of observations. First, if a company is going to be late to market, then a competitive product has to be so much better than the existing market leaders that it is practically a new paradigm. That is how Apple’s iPhone displaced BlackBerry in the first place.

Second, incremental advantages offered at or near the same price as the market leaders will not get the job done. BlackBerry’s offerings are not priced low enough to steal market share from either Apple or Android-based phones from Samsung, Motorola and the other vendors.

The Raymond James survey did not ask about phones from Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK) and others that use the Windows Phone operating system from Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT). There was really no need to because Nokia and BlackBerry are both in an identical position — too far behind to snag any meaningful share of the market.

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