Tuesday, April 19, 2011

BlackBerry Playbook: How did Research in Motion lose its way? - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

Excerpt from a RIM reality check (via All Things Digital)

The incoherence, I think, is a sign of something deeper: Research in Motion doesn't know what kind of company it wants to be. It made its fortune selling gadgets to chief information officers—IT guys who wanted to give their employees access to office e-mail on the go, but only in a way that accorded with corporate security policies. When they talk about RIM's strengths, the company's leaders like to point to their "CIO friendliness." The trouble is, being friendly with CIOs doesn't matter as much as it used to. Nowadays people don't ask the tech guy which mobile gadgets pass muster. Instead, tech guys look to employees to decide which gadgets to support. RIM's strategy—to infiltrate companies as a first step to becoming a mass-market hit—has been eclipsed by the Apple approach, which is to infiltrate schools and homes, and then hope that regular people nag their IT guys to let them use iPads at work, too.

BlackBerry Playbook: How did Research in Motion lose its way? - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine#p2#p2#p2#p2

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