COMMENTARY | Investors at RIM -- the company that makes the BlackBerry smartphone and BlackBerry PlayBook tablet -- have been pushing the company for awhile now to get rid of its two co-ceos, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, on acount of their complete failure to adapt to the changing market. In a nutshell, Apple's iPhone caught them off-guard; and not only did they fail to respond appropriately, they failed to even realize that there was a problem until it was too late.
Well, RIM's replaced its CEOs now, on account of the last two resigned. And according to Reuters, it's got a new one now, former Seimens AG exec Thorsten Heins. He's been given a year and a half by investors to shake things up, and turn the company around from having to write off $485 million in unsold BlackBerry PlayBooks to being able to write off its former competitors.
The problem with this plan? It's still too late for RIM. The company's ...
Not in the game anymore
"At the very core of RIM ... is the innovation," says Heins, in a video interview posted to YouTube. "We always think ahead." But as the graphs posted by Nielsen show, RIM's customers are the ones thinking ahead, by switching to non-BlackBerry smartphones. Almost 15 percent of all current smartphone owners that Nielsen surveyed own a BlackBerry, but only 6 percent of smartphone buyers last quarter chose one.
The BlackBerry Torch was poorly thought-out and panned by reviewers, and the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet has seen multiple huge sales as RIM's tried to unload its inventory. It still doesn't even let you check email without owning a BlackBerry smartphone, and the long-awaited Android App Player is still missing. And the reason RIM's so far behind is because ...
Its corporate culture is dysfunctional
Maybe you're skeptical of the tell-all letter an anonymous RIM exec sent to Boy Genius Report, or of the two other letters it got from RIM insiders. Maybe you think they're just upset about something, or the problems are exaggerated, or it's no worse than at the company that you work for. That's okay. A company's performance in the marketplace isn't determined by how many frustrated letters its employees write, to people they feel will actually listen to them.
On the other hand, when outsiders like Jamie Murai run up against RIM's corporate culture, they get a bad impression of it too. And when RIM can't attract app developers like him to write for its gadgets, it might be time for the company to ...
Consider its audience
I don't just mean "developers, developers, developers, developers." I mean actual people, and not corporate IT departments. (Even if Mitt Romney thinks that corporations are people too.)
It didn't take much to wow people in 2005. And the same features that made BlackBerry smartphones attractive to individual buyers, like instant email and great hardware keyboards, made them attractive to corporate buyers as well. Much of RIM's growth has been driven by the corporate market.
But people are starting to use their own gadgets at work now, or even choose iPads for deployment at their companies. The corporate world's starting to realize that by pretending it can make decisions without having any emotions about them, it's missing out on the most powerful, most useful hardware and apps.
Those aren't made by RIM anymore. And it's too late for RIM to realize that.
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