Publicly, Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Balsillie belittled the iPhone and its shortcomings, including its short battery life, weaker security and initial lack of e-mail. […]
Internally, he had a very different message. “If that thing catches on, we’re competing with a Mac, not a Nokia,” he recalled telling his staff.
From How BlackBerry blew it: The inside story – The Globe and Mail
The whole article is worth reading, detailing as it does the decision process inside BlackBerry during the painful disruption of its core business.
What struck me most however was how similar their decisions were to those of Nokia at about the same time. Consider:
- The engineering priorities placed on optimization around constrained hardware. Although engineers knew how to build the right products, the business priorities caused them to be deployed in the wrong direction.
- The delays these misdirected efforts caused. Mobile phones have narrow windows of opportunity but long lead times. A strategic mistake is very costly and most probably impossible to remedy. In the case of BlackBerry, buying QNX came too late while for Nokia the deprecation of Symbian was catastrophically managed.
- The feedback loop from network operators which shut down any initiatives for improved user experiences. Your best customers provide all the wrong information when the market is being disrupted. Ignoring them is impossible while complying is a strategic mistake.
- The demand from network operators to develop “killers” to competing platform-based products1 and the subsequent “jumping at the opportunity”.
- Listening to large buyers at the expense of users. While BlackBerry was guided to omit consumer features from its enterprise buyers, Nokia never secured enterprise buyers of any significance2. Nevertheless it created the “E series” business-friendly phones which suppressed features like cameras and music.
- The celebrity sponsorships and wasted promotional efforts in the face of structural failures. This is manifested today by HTC as well.
The parallelism of this synchronized failure can be seen in the following graph showing smartphone volumes. Continue reading “Competing with a Mac”