∞ RIM shoots itself in the foot and tries to shoot the bullet out

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I’m always looking for interesting, sometimes funny, things to read and pass along to you. I never know where I’ll find it, but today I found something in the comments right here on The Loop.

In my story yesterday “RIM is the Boston Red Sox of technology,” reader Benjam wrote this comment that made me laugh out loud because it seems so true.

I am canadian but I just laugh everytime I see RIM in the news. Their phones are years behind, the outage, the abysmal app store, terrible direction, investing 100 mil to buy a cloud computing company a year or 2 to late and most of all the playbook. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot and then trying to shoot the original bullet out. (and further the metaphor sitting and watching your foot get gangrene then trying to shoot that off) RIM needs to design an awesome phone, os, AppStore, than give it away for free to get customers back.



  • http://www.tenfingercrunch.com Michael Bartholomew

    RIM has a brand issue in addition to a technology issue. I believe that companies can come back from the brink, but until RIM replaces their co-CEOs with a single leader painting a concrete vision it will be more of the same from them. Even if they are able to turn the ship around product-wise, they will still need to convince people that the RIM brand is not the old one.

    • http://www.loopinsight.com Jim Dalrymple

      Exactly what I said yesterday. Great minds…

  • Anthony

    Apparently this will all be resolved later today when RIM announces “something” that is going to “leapfrog” the entire industry! Wonder if that something is a phone that doesn’t suck? Wait, no probably not.

    As long as the Mike and Jim show are in charge I don’t see things getting better. Personally I can’t stand BlackBerry’s although there was a time when I thought they were the greatest thing ever.

    But that was in 2004…..

  • BoredInOttawa

    Really, the thing to remember here is how much of this is the story of Nortel repeating itself.  Mike and Jim were not Nortel, but they hired a tremendous number of the “executive” talent that ruined Nortel.  And how its repeating.  There is great technology at RIM, it is being held back by inept management at multiple senior levels. 

    • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

      Inept management traditionally seeks to prevent any change that it feels threatened by, including genuinely innovative ideas. Horace Dediu wrote about this a little while back on his Asymco blog while discussing Microsoft.