[Info-vax] OT: Lessons not learned

[JF Mezei]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2011/10/12/is-it-too-late-to-fix-research-in-motion/

This is an article about RIM which has suffered nothing but bad news in
the last coupe of years because of its image of initially having
dismissed the competition from Apple , its phones not keeping up and now
 stability problems with ist proprietary servers.

Reading the article reminded me of another company which, in he 1980s,
was riding high with success and thought it was invincible while it was
killing off the "bunch" one by one, only to be blindsighted by the PC
and Sun and refusing to lower its margins to compete.


In the case of Digital, it all happened in slow motion compared to
today's world. But it seems to me that RIM has many similar traits with
the founders refusing to see the iphone as a threath in 2007 and
continuing with business as usual, and once financial analysts started
to criticise that it was not growing fast enough (compared to others),
RIM reacted by cutting jobs.

In Canada, this is, of course, big news because it is an icon, or
rather, yet another failing icon (after Nortel).

I would hope that business schools would learn from this and teach MBAs
about the pitfalls of success. Because it appears that RIM didn't learn
from Digital's history. They should have.