Notes &
How to save RIM
- Recognize that Marco Arment is smarter than anyone on your Board and fire the lot of them.
- Hire Apple’s Scott Forstall, at any price. Even if it didn’t help (cause really you’d need Jonny Ive and Tim Cook, and half a dozen other people, too), it would hurt Apple. A lot. It would certainly shake things up; fresh blood is needed.
- Kill Adobe Flash support, and give Adobe back their source code: it’s a money pit. Worse? It’s not a product differentiator: the market doesn’t care. Next!
- You had one advantage going into the fight with Apple et al — truly secure email — and you blew it. Show your customers that you won’t bow down to governments (esp. but not limited to totalitarian dictatorships) that want back-door access to your network. Do it publicly. It’s not about terrorism (nothing ever is): it’s about cheating spouses who don’t want to get caught. They’ll notice.
- You tried to introduce a product — the PlayBook — that didn’t support your biggest advantage — email. Its OS was MIA. Amateur hour needs to be over.
- Put your crack hardware teams (that are desperately trying to eek out performance and battery life out of devices saddled with Adobe Flash) in a room and don’t let them out until they have an idea for a product that does one thing better/faster/cheaper/longer than anyone else’s. Who knows? Maybe they’ll come up with a PlayBook that can do email.
- If there’s one thing that being a Mac user in the 90s taught me, it’s that marketing is huge. Apple marketing was anemic until Jobs came back. None of this smug, amateurish “amateur hour is over” nonsense, either. You’ve been handed your hat, shown the door, and you’re lying face-down in the mud. Act like it: be scrappy, be aggressive, but don’t be arrogant. Then people will just be happy to see you fail. Even Canadians.
