RIM is rotting from within

The “Good Old Boy” syndrome described can happen anywhere. The company is described as having 50-something executives who are out of touch making decisions. You can find hundreds of tech companies like this in Toronto, New York, Seattle, and SV. Some guys build a company, are successful, hire people just like them, times change, but they don’t change with it, and refuse to hire new blood.

For a theory like this to be credible, it must explain RIM, but also explain other failures and successes. You can’t posit that Apple couldn’t have existed in Wisconsin and use that hypothetical as an example to bolster the reasoning that Apple couldn’t have existed in Wisconsin. My question is, how did Microsoft succeed in the PNW? And why is it no longer succeeding in quite the same way?

I agree that Waterloo’s talent pool is interesting by virtue of UW, but not as deep as SV. Then again, lots of SV companies make these mistakes, so I think it’s more fruitful to look at the mistakes than to try to theorize about the environment somehow creating the mistakes, as if RIM would somehow be Apple if they had only relocated a decade ago.

Wuhhh? The article makes some good points but this quote stuck out like a sore thumb to me. What on earth does that have to do with anything?

In any case, being in an unusual location is not necessarily a terrible thing. Companies in SV battle against employees jumping from company to company constantly- everywhere has its challenges.

There are a lot of things wrong with RIM, but I think the author of this article missed most of them, focusing largely on a bunch of points that were either irrelevant or incorrect.

First of all, as many have mentioned, Waterloo is not located in the rural heart of Canada, nor is there a particularly huge problem finding talent in the area. Like many universities we have a co-op work program during which students find employment at a variety of companies including Microsoft, Apple and Google. Bill Gates has stated that "Most years, we hire more students out of Waterloo than any university in the world, typically 50 or even more"[1]. This leads me to believe that it's not a lack of available talent that has plagued RIM, but the ability to attract and retain it.

Each term, RIM hires hundreds of students for co-op work terms. From a student's perspective, it doesn't feel particularly challenging to get a job there the same way it would for Google or Facebook. For this reason, I suspect the best and brightest of our classes likely end up working in the States, rather than sticking around here.

There are certainly some cultural issues at play here. Many of the people I knew who worked at RIM were never challenged by their work or held accountable for it and this lead to an incredibly low productivity. I've known people that show up to work there drunk occasionally and high consistently. That same individual went to work at a smaller mobile company his following term and was working unpaid overtime on weekends simply because he enjoyed the work. Of course, this is all anecdotal, but it paints a picture for me about what working for the company must be like.

In my opinion, RIM needs to hire fewer students, and pay them more competitively. They need to hold their employees accountable for productivity and team leaders and managers accountable for the people they oversee.

All this being said, I sometimes can't help but wonder if RIM's problems are over-exaggerated. True, they're losing market share, but they're still profitable on the order of billions aren't they?

[1] http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Canada/20051013/billgates_waterloo...

Surely some monetization potential there?

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/08/04/iphone-preferred-by-adults-bl...

http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-teen-girls-want-blackbe...

PS: As a 50+ Maths teacher, I achieved instant credibility by purchasing a payg blackberry recently, mainly because I like qwerty phones and wanted a G3 connection, and, yes I live in a provincial city in the UK. Another market?

I don't think this bodes well for their future as the 2 phones I was involved with at Motorola (as a contractor) were pure disasters and a majority of the US people that were involved were hired by RIM.

So how do your account for their prior success?

And calling that area "rural" or "provincial" (well, it is within a Province, after all) is just geographically inept. If they were in Whitehorse, that would be one thing.

Perhaps their prior great success exposed them to the possibility of disruption?

I am wondering why we need the articles from itworld here anyway?