For some unknown reason to me, northern countries once were *THE* leaders in communication equipment. NOKIA is Finnish, Ericsson is Swedish, Nortel and RIM are Canadians. Why is this? Maybe the long winters experienced on these latitudes force people to think to communicate better, since most of them are hibernating like the polar bears 🙂 Of all the previously mentioned, only Ericsson stands still “healthy”. The rest have succumbed to new entrants, specifically on the mobile devices, NOKIA & Blackberry (the company formerly known as RIM) simply couldn’t keep pace and the fast iterations provided by the Apple & Google duo.

How come this happens again to a (Canadian) Blackberry?

It’s not like companies losing leadership is a surprise! After all, Nortel lost air speed way before BB, hence a local (a.k.a Canadian) example was close by, so this scenario would have been avoided. Not to mention, DEC, Altavista, Commodore, RCA, Lehman Brothers, etc. etc. etc. Big companies most certainly will disappear, or at leads the might follow the 10 year success cycle sports team experience like Chicago Bulls, Atlanta Braves, S.S.C. Napoli, etc. etc. etc.

The internet is full of explanation on why Blackberry has shrunk, of all of them, this one caught my attention because it exemplifies (from my point of view) the human factor involved in the situation.

As the iPhone (after 2007) was gaining traction, RIM was at its peak, thus the numbers management had were the very best of the company history. It’s very, very hard to foresee something wrong when you’re doing so well, you simply don’t want to spoil it, so why make any changes!?! If it works don’t fix it!

Its easy now to see that, that was the peak, however nobody knows the future, it’s quite difficult to seat and say, yeap! that’s it, we’re peaking! from now on it will be downhill, we need to do something, now!

RIM managers can be blamed for not reacting, but they would had to be very abstracted from their company to react in the way that was needed. Granted, is their job to do just that (to try to foresee where their business is going), to adapt to change. The thing was, the change was happening faster than everybody could assimilate it, even for Apple (which was growing like crazy at that time), it is much difficult to steer a running ship in another direction at its best moment, even when there’s a faint light in the sky coming towards you. By the time they realize it, it was a missile, it was too late.