RIM is not the First Tech Co to Stifle Innovation

RIM’s fall has been fast and hard. Sur­pris­ingly so because old tech­nol­ogy dies slower than old teach­ers. But, they’re not the only tech­nol­ogy com­pany to dis­par­age inno­va­tion, while insist­ing their way is best.

I enjoy Philip Elmer-Dewitt’s arti­cles because they’re well researched. He has good fact and they’re always pre­sented well. It’s not your typ­i­cal “anti-Apple bash­ing” or “mind­less Apple sup­port” you see in the com­ments of any blog post about Apple. He’s got a recent post titled “What the Black­berry Guys Said as Apple Ate Their Lunch” that makes a fun read.

In fact, I’d say many tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies behave this way, and for the most part they suc­ceed because change is hard. Espe­cially tech­nol­ogy change. Whether it’s enter­prise soft­ware that needs to root out estab­lished software’s exist­ing inte­gra­tions, or con­sumer tech­nol­ogy that requires users to use new ges­tures. It’s hard.

Unfor­tu­nately for RIM, they went up against Apple.

I hope Microsoft and oth­ers start to real­ize that what they’ve got isn’t good enough any­more. That they lose their fear of can­ni­bal­iz­ing their own offer­ings, because if they don’t Apple will. And, that com­pa­nies real­ize that tech­nol­ogy can and should be fun to use, and try to fig­ure out how to put fun back into the equa­tion, regard­less of the type of tech­nol­ogy offered.

Lis­ten to Microsoft talk about Win­dows 8 and their new tablet offer­ings. It shows the same fail­ure to acknowl­edge real­ity that RIM showed lead­ing up to this weeks results. Microsoft is the king. A very suc­cess­ful com­pany and part of every­thing every­one does all day long. But, in my opin­ion, that just means it’ll take longer for Apple and Google to kill them. (I hope you saw Gartner’s release about cloud email yesterday.)

You know why I “splurge” on fun/cool/light lap­tops and phones?

I spend more time with them than I do with any­thing else in my life. Sad? Maybe. But, if I’m car­ry­ing around a phone in my pocket all day long, I’d rather it feel and look like a piece of art, than a cheap piece of plas­tic. Espe­cially when the cost is the same.