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...