More letters to RIM; employees rally alongside anonymous exec
bgr.com
bgr.com
Don't expect RIM's fortunes to turn around any time soon. Only a catastrophic business failure is going to shake up the management structure. With RIM's financials and market position, it could be years before that event comes to pass. Even then, there's no guarantee that RIM would really make a recovery. Most likely RIM will be absorbed by a larger competitor (and the current RIM top brass removed) before anything like real business failure can occur.
It's so painful to watch this. RIM has really made some great products and services.
I think the most likely outcome is RIM stockholders will force some big changes after a few more quarters of getting drilled by Android and Apple's holiday lineup. Then 6-8 months later we'll see RIM starting to ship consumer Android devices with a Blackberry security/messaging ui layer alongside their other products. It will stabilize their fortunes and they could go on to be the leading Android vendor with their strong brand and messaging focus.
edit: you could even argue that they can't really do that now and couldn't do it last year. Everyone would say they're crazy to kill the golden egg and go make lower margin phones. They needed to have disaster quarters, failed products and tanking market share in order to make these decisions.
For my money, I'll take the opposite side and say that RIM's too far gone down the entrenchment hole to recover with much dignity.
I have a feeling that even if they go down that route, they won't be the leading Android vendor.
If RIM is unable to innovate for a few more quarters, then their brand will be worth less. The longer they hold out, the less their brand is worth. If they switch to Android after their brand has taken hits, they will not do so well. Samsung and HTC are firmly entrenched in the Android market, and I doubt a weakened RIM would be able to overtake them.
Abandoned like Nokia's investment in Meego?
It's been only in the past month or so that he muttered something about the competition getting tough lately.
It just seems RIM leadership is extremely arrogant and proud. They see the train coming right at them, but are too afraid to make the radical blue ocean product that's required to save them.
Stuff like this makes me think of the dolphins in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."
The problem is that all the old players were left in the dust because they had too much momentum on their old platforms. It's like hitting the breaks when you are going 100 mph. For Google and Apple, they were going 0-60 pretty quickly and then just slowly came up and surpassed the incumbents.
There's a Steve Jobs quote about what happens when the sales guy starts running the show at tech companies that's relevant here. Even if it's not the CEO, too much of a company's top brass can get wedded to yesterday's products.
http://techcrunch.com/2007/12/17/android-prototype-lets-hope...
There is so much secrecy in the company, no one knows anything about new things until we see it on the news. That means we’re not able to tell our friends and family anything about new things, and that reflects badly on RIM.
Is the reason it works for Apple so well and not for RIM because people anticipate Apple products more (i.e. the products are better), or because Apple are better at showbusiness, or both of the above, or something else?
I for one, despite being a huge Blackberry fan, never even realised there was any secrecy ahead of launches, I've never anticipated new product announcements or put much thought into what they would be.
The way I combat that is by documenting what is working right and determining what I don't want to change. Your process requirements then become "Learn/Enable/Etc this" and "Leave that unaffected".
It becomes surprisingly good at checking rampant process growth because you have an anchor.
What is needed to energize an organization is the willingness to make mistake and accept failure as part of life. There should be a "mistake-fund." Allocate 10% or 20% of downside in revenue for mistake/failure people make. It's ok to make mistake in trying and growing. This lessens the need to overreact in every crisis to create new rules and processes, and encourage risk taking.
The "mistake-fund" shouldn't be just lip-service and part of the company culture. "Have you tried something this week to use up the mistake-fund?" should be a regular theme.
Here's what's wrong, RIM: you're not presenting your products right. Your business audience doesn't care that the PlayBook has true multitasking, nor do they care that there's Flash on-board. They want a device to manage their emails and make running their business easier.
And the BlackBerry is really sad to see in my eyes. You buy this nice software company and their HTML5 browser, and then put it in a crappy phone that has half the specs of the competition? You have so much potential, I can see it and feel it... but you're not utilising your resources properly. Study the iPhone and Android and see why they're popular.
BGR's original leaked letter mentioned that RIM was advertising its products wrong. I agree completely. Whenever I see a RIM ad, I just shake my head. They really aren't advertising the right things. They're putting good things like BBM aside.
I don't have a RIM device, but almost all of my co-workers do. I like my iPhone, and I'm not trying to sound like an idiotic fanboy, but RIM: I used to respect you a lot. You ran your business very well, and your devices could have been considered revolutionary. Get your shit together.
1. Keyboard
2. BBM
3. E-mail
I'm surprised RIM hasn't figured this out by now and put on their advertisements "BlackBerry XXXX whatever - types easier, instantly communicate better, and e-mail faster" (btw - whether or not these are really true is up to debate, but IMO they are the only selling points)
I see ads all of the time for BB's that talk about Facebook/Twitter. I haven't heard a single good thing about the facebook/twitter apps for BB or any BB app for that matter.
When I first saw it I thought "about time, that's what they need to do - capitalise on the fact that BBM is selling phones to teenagers/young people".
And then it ends with a guy in a suit checking his bank details with a message about online security.
Totally destroys the message that the advert was, until then, successfully portraying.
In my opinion, a company can only function well if there's open and honest communication.
Interestingly, I would hope the RIM employees who've written this letter (and the guy who wrote the first letter) would've started shorting stock. If RIM responds again, I'm sure as hell doing it.
And even more so because their response utterly blew.
They should not try to be a better Apple than Apple.
Focus on their market.
(a) Be awesome at email (and therefore have keyboards.)
(b) Take phone calls.
(c) Integrate with your calendar.
(d) Have awesome instant messaging (BBM?).
(e) Be able to survive a 20 foot drop.
(f) Have excellent battery life.
(g) Be much cheaper than the iPhone/Android.
If you're a business, you want to be able to give everyone this type of device on their first day of work, all set up with everything. There should be no expectation of personal use and there should be every expectation that everyone in the company has and uses one.
I'm getting the feeling the Playbook's selling point is "We don't need a youtube app, you can just browse YouTube inline!"
However, listening to a singer repeat "Flash" over and over does absolutely nothing to make me want a Playbook. I run into flash problems one a week at most; I'll glady trade it for battery life, performance, and stability.
That's not just "a singer".
It's Freddie Mercury himself.
People at the bottom make lots of little decisions every day. They may get lucky now and then, but over a year, the occasional bad luck will cancel that out. So you have more meritocracy at the bottom, and less the higher up you go.
In a large organization like RIM, the principle talent of senior management is not strategic decision making, or management, but rent seeking: appropriating the product of the lower ranks for their own glory. Other principle qualities: fine grooming and dress, a firm hand shake, politics, public speaking, and punctuality. These qualities are practiced daily. You can't fake it. Strategic decision making? A few times a year.
Add a little random luck in strategic decisions, and you have the CEO. There are enough contenders for his position that someone, somewhere will have a string of good enough fortune to land them there, regardless of merit.
[hat tip to Taleb re: executives and strategic decision making]
Good leaders realize that they must to some degree listen to their underlings, they shouldnt be beholden to underlings, but they should always listen and know when act on what they hear and when not to.
What is necessary isnt 'democracy' per se, but some means of a good body rejecting a bad brain, because bad leadership more than any other single thing is what kills companies, and typically there is nothing structurally in place to eliminate bad leaders.
RIM's problem isn't a lack of a body or a brain, but rather a broken nervous system. RIM's fingers are slowly being burned in the fire and the brain is just happily looking on, since it's not feeling the danger from any nerve impulses.