We’ve made a lot of changes in the past 18 months. Not changes, but also evolution. I changed a lot of my management team, in hardware, software … I’ve trained a lot of other people in the last four years. What do you think I did?Thorsten Heins

Wow. Just, wow. RIM spent 4+ years falling from market leader to market punchline, and these two gentlemen finally decide to jump ship.

Did I say falling from market leader? I should have said stagnating from market leader.

Stagnation within RIM started in the earlier part of last decade. The last (and first) great idea after push-mail was BBM, and that was somewhere around 2006. BBM is really the only end-user feature that has been fully backed and worthy of usage. Every other consumer-oriented feature in the RIM line is lazy and sloppy.

To me, RIM’s troubles go right to the root of product design. When you design a product for a specific market you have massively limited your appeal. BlackBerry wasn’t a success because people liked the product, they liked the experiences that BlackBerry enabled. Beyond that their design was based around the needs of a market (enterprise) rather than the end user (human).

In the phone / portable market it seems that when you have devices geared towards humans in a broad sense, you can always add specific market appeal via software (obviously there are some exceptions). That being the case, products that humans enjoy using will be the most successful over any period of time.

caugh iphone caugh