Why RIM is doomed
After RIM’s Sunday announcement that it would replace co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, I wondered, is it too little, too late for the company behind the once-dominant BlackBerry? My fellow bloggers and writers, who weighed in with some brutally honest takes, seem to think so. I tend to agree.
Ben Brooks, for instance, lists seven things he would do if he were CEO of RIM, culminating in this gem: “With everyone gone, hire a new executive team.” I’m with ya, Ben. If you take a look at RIM’s board of directors, four of the nine members are executives at RIM. Compare that to Apple whose only in-house board member is CEO Tim Cook, and you begin to see the problem. Digging deeper reveals that three other RIM board members are executives at banks, namely Royal Bank of Canada, Credit Suisse, and Sun Life Finanacial. The problem? There’s no diversity in thinking within that group. And there’s no innovative thinking, either.
Marco Arment let a doodle do the talking. He posted a hilarious image of a plane nosediving into the ground, with the caption: “Someone else can take it from here.” The cartoon’s as funny as it is accurate, in my opinion. Sure, RIM wants to do better, but the problem, and solution, doesn’t lie with the pilots. It’s the plane, or company. It’s their direction and stale thinking. They don’t need a new RIM executive, someone who learned to fly at the same here-comes-the-ground flight school, to take over the stick. Nothing would change. They need a completely new vision, and that starts with passing the reins to someone who’s not from RIM.
Speaking of half-measures, RIM has said it’s open to licensing its upcoming OS, dubbed “BlackBerry 10.” I call that a half-measure because, really, how appealing, and marketable, is an OS that has few apps and sub-par hardware? Consider how tough it’s been for Windows Phone 7 to get traction, and that’s an OS that is worlds better than anything we’ve seen from RIM. With that in mind, I seriously doubt licensing a meager OS will revive the company.
Some will contend it’s premature to write off RIM, and that technology and its pushers are inherently unpredictable. They might point to Apple, a company that looked as doomed as Marco’s plane in the ‘90s, only to miraculously right itself and head toward the moon for the past 15 years. But RIM hasn’t acted nearly so radically. Like PALM, they’ve stubbornly refused to reinvent themselves, to elect a new board and fresh CEO, and I think that’s much more likely to doom than reinvigorate them.
Pingback: The TechBlock podcast 01.29.12 | The TechBlock
Pingback: News Ticker | The TechBlock