RIM is rotting from within

http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wireless/233771/rim-rotting-within

by junioreven • 15 years ago

41 23 15 years ago

raganwald2• 15 years ago

Speaking as an Ontarian with some familiarity with the Waterloo area, I strongly doubt that its rural location has anything to do with RIM’s problems.

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.

hvs• 15 years ago

I'm not familiar with Waterloo, but I think/feel/assume that companies take on the culture of their executives, not necessarily their locales. Every company that I've worked for over the past 15-20 years has largely had the "personality" of its CEO and high-level executives. If they are aloof and dismissive of "the underlings", the company as a whole will be like that.

I guess my point is that assholes can be anywhere, and a lot of them end up in executive positions. If they are also incompetent, they have a tendency to bring their companies down with them.

ChrisMac• 15 years ago

I live in Waterloo and also think it's a stretch to call it rural. Sure, it's not a metropolis, but there are about 500,000 people in the immediate region. Toronto, the country's largest city, is also only an hour-and-a-half drive away, along a well-worn, built up commuter route. Overall, South-Western Ontario is the most populous part of the country. I rarely feel like I'm out in the middle of nowhere. There's a definite sense that the city is in Toronto's sphere.

a3camero• 15 years ago

Also, RIM isn't just in Waterloo. There's a fairly substantial Mississauga office that is in the Greater Toronto Area. RIM also has offices in Ottawa, the US and Britain.

mechanical_fish• 15 years ago

I, too, thought this griping about Ontario was beside the point - someone is working out their pet peeve. Did RIM move to southern Ontario after becoming a big success? If not, then isn't this talent pool that is now supposedly holding them back the same one that made them great in the first place?

Businesses get disrupted. It happens, and it happens in much the same way everywhere.

randomdata• 15 years ago

I am from rural Ontario, about an hour's drive away from RIM. There seems to a disproportionate number of people skilled in high tech and design coming from my region. I've seen some pretty amazing work coming from these people.

Technology and design was a strong part of the high school curriculum, which may explain the amount of talent we have. Our schools even had labs of SGI machines, when SGI was still a hot company, for design courses, which I think would have been fairly unheard of for most high schools at the time.

So I believe the talent is out there, even in the rural areas. RIM is just doing a poor job of acquiring it.

untog• 15 years ago

it is unacceptable in this day and age that a global brand should have the vast majority of its citizens derived from a [...] less important country (Canada), that does not have a history of empire

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.

afterburner• 15 years ago

Yeah, that bit sounds like chauvinist BS.

tptacek• 15 years ago

I see 'junioreven is the new 'jfruh, posting everything that hits ITWorld in the hopes it'll bring some page views to their site. Can we just set up some kind of RSS scrapey thing and be done with it, guys?

rorrr2• 15 years ago

RIM is done. Only a true miracle can save them.

tibbon• 15 years ago

Agreed 100%. They did something good, fell asleep at the wheel and I assumed that they were already dead, in the ground and turned to dust (at least as far as relevance goes).

grannyg00se2• 15 years ago

I don't know what qualifies as a miracle these days but I don't think their task is unreachable. They have cash (as far as I know) and they still have some decent brand recognition. They also have a supply chain, and distribution.

They are still in a great position to make positive moves, the fact is they need to make those moves. Soon.

rorrr2• 15 years ago

Yes, they could make a groundbreaking phone, but to make it profitable would require a miracle.

BlackBerry OS can't compete with IOS or Android, it's too specialized and too crappy.

I think their only way to save themselves is to fire 85% of the executives, which will never happen. They are in charge, and they are getting paid extremely well, while driving company into the ground. They are just trying to squeeze as much money as possible from the dying company, that's why their CEO makes these ridiculous statements.

raganwald2• 15 years ago

“Miracle” is imprecise. How about this definition: A company is “done” when the probability of its success falls below the probability of a startup in the same space succeeding.

Apple was “done” in that sense before Steve Jobs returned. he did turn it around, and RIM could be turned around, but as a business exercise, the optimal strategy is to extract as much value as you can for as long as you can rather than try to hit another home run.

True, you could always hope for a visionary CEO with the credibility and skills to do something productive with what you have, but that isn’t the way to bet.

troymc• 15 years ago

To be fair, Michael Dell said something similar about Apple circa 1997. A miracle did save them.

keithpeter• 15 years ago

Blackberry phones are must have items for UK teenagers (its the BBM accounts, which are cheap or free here, add free wifi over college campus and you can chat for nowt). Skull Candy or Sony headphones listening to music and chatting on BBM is what they all do at lunchtimes. The demographic doesn't stretch to Dr Dre.

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?

jorgecastillo• 15 years ago

RIM is not done and saying this is nonsense. BlackBerry devices are still selling and will keep selling. They may never again have a huge market share but they are far from dead, a decent market share is all they need. Some people are delusional believing that people don't want BlackBerry smartphones anymore. As a current Android user I can tell you that my next smartphone will not be an Android one. I will not be recommending Android smartphones to anyone I know either. To me BlackBerry smartphones seem like a good choice and that is what I will be recommending if asked.

Permit• 15 years ago

I'll preface this with the disclaimer that I'm a University of Waterloo student, so my opinion might be biased. Despite this, I have no particular bias for RIM that I'm aware of, and couldn't see myself owning any of the products they currently produce. I've also never worked for RIM, but I have a number of close friends who have for co-op work terms.

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...

icegreentea• 15 years ago

Also a UW student. This is hearsay, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's totally something I can believe.

One of the reasons why so many RIM jobs aren't as 'exciting' as Microsoft or Google jobs is because in the last last generation of RIM products, they actually had coops do a lot of work that got released into production, and then started playing hell after they left for the term. RIM apparently got burned pretty bad with that, so now attempts to limit how much coop work actually goes into production.

This was from gossiping with a RIM employee who I played Ultimate Frisbee with.

Alexmania• 15 years ago

This article is just BS if you are blaming RIM on Southern Ontario because it doesn't have any talent you clearly have no idea about it. How can you compare Wisconsin to Ontario that's just stupid.

fredsanford• 15 years ago

RIM has an office in South Florida and I believe they came here to pick up the unhappy Motorola Cell Division employees. Anyway, they hired a bunch of people away from Motorola that were just poor quality developers.

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.

wglb• 15 years ago

Hmmm. far from any technology hub that would contain a deep talent pool of developers.

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?

RIM is rotting from within

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