5 Things RIM Should Start Now!
I’ve been following RIM for a couple years now. More so the past few months. Shaking my head a lot at some of the decisions they’ve made. Understanding some as well. They’ve landed themselves in some trouble.
3 Areas Where They’re Wrong
1. They’re phones aren’t up to date. They’re lagging behind the competition. They’re slow and laggy. They functional as e-mail phones, but so are all the other new smart phones coming out. The market has shifted to a consumer centric design, but they haven’t moved in that direction yet.
2. The Playbook was incomplete from the get go. They launched on QNX, which is great. Why they didn’t focus on building QNX for their phones first, and then launching the tablet in a year or two, blows my mind. I know they wanted to beat the other players to the market, but the phones have and always will make a larger portion of sales, and they can make up for their lost market share by redeveloping their OS on a faster system.
3. The management has got to make some major changes. A lot of people are clammoring for the CEOs to go. It’s not really necessary. They won’t go away without a VERY strong fight. But they can turn around the corporate bureaucracy and put leaders in place who can drive a product oriented company.
It’s hard to blame them. They started this company a long time ago, and rode the success, and changing things around isn’t easy. Just ask Howard Schultz from Starbucks or Michael Dell. I read Schultz’s book and wanted to e-mail him to give an “intervention” to RIM’s CEOs.
Innovation in this industry is KEY. You can’t rest on your laurels and do minimal and obvious improvements. RIM has smart people. They just need to bring back innovation and turn around the bureaucracy. I found bureaucracy to be huge at General Motors when I worked there, which was to be expected. It’s hard to turn it around in an industrial/automotive industry, but it’s ingrained into the soul of a tech company.
5 Steps for RIM:
1. Create a strong product strategy, and bring in proven product managers from the big guns
2. Give those product managers the power, and make sure they let their teams have the power and the room to create the products wanted
3. Give every employee an iPhone and Android phone for a month at a time. Let them play with the top of the line phones. If they only use BlackBerrys, minimal improvements will be made, but if they use the competition on a daily basis, they’ll be able to see the possibilities.
4. One CEO. One leader. One person to lead the company on the right path with a new sense of direction. He/she doesn’t have to say that everything’s wrong, but the right changes need to be made. Their last conference call concerned me because they acted like nothing was wrong. But I hope they really knew differently.
5. Push development of QNX phones and make sure it’s top notch and at least matches the rest. The corporate market is great, and RIM has it covered, but the consumer market is where their growth has been and the key to that is the at least match competition on the OS, design and price
+ a bunch of other changes. But these are the big ones that I see. Innovation has to be sparked from the top all the way to the bottom, and real change can be made. They’re still in a great position. Almost a $1B in profits for the quarter and near 25% market share. But the growth, that’s concerning everyone, has to be reignited.
