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by felipemnoa 5196 days ago
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

I find it incredible that RIM or their customers did do all of these things. In fact, a lot of the major phone companies did this, even Nokia and Microsoft.
1 comments
arkitaip 5196 days ago
This is the most important topic in this discussion and maybe the most topic for any startup or company in general. How do prevent your business from becoming obsolete? Is that even possible in the long run for IT firms? How about staying hungry or at least not becoming arrogant like RIM?
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jfb 5196 days ago
It doesn't matter. Everything dies.

You get hugely successful, defining a new product. You build a very effective business to capitalize on your product. The state you were operating in when you designed/built your product is by necessity baked into your business. Life, for a time, becomes Very Good.

But the world state changes. This is inevitable. You don't care — there's enough money in what you do so that changing your business just isn't rational. So you keep on keeping on, and your culture continues to grow in the direction allowed — fighting to keep the status quo, even as the rest of the world is moving on.

And then at some point, once the world state you built into your company (that has been profitable for you since day one) and the current world state diverge to the point that you can't even understand the change required, and you are going to be staring down obsolescence. There's nothing you can do. Your entire company is predicated on fitting a context that no longer exists. You can't understand what's happened, because to understand what has happened your company would have to be a very different company.

And you die.

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jodrellblank 5196 days ago
> It doesn't matter. Everything dies.

"Why do all companies die, wheras almost all cities survive? You can drop an atom bomb on a city and it will survive".

http://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_o...

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kooshball 5196 days ago
Excellent TED talk. Thanks for the link.
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wvenable 5196 days ago
I think RIM also made the fatal mistake of focusing on their competition rather than their customers. Their response to the iPhone was to build a bunch of rather crappy touch-only devices. They responded to the iPad with the Playbook.

I suspect, if they survive, the playbook will be killed off as well as any phones resembling the iPhone.

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