[RUMOUR] RIM to Sell its Caramel and Sundae Secrets!

When Research in Motion (RIM) announced it was looking to JP Morgan and RBC for advise on its strategy, you knew they had no strategy.  There is only one reason to go this route: The board and the management ‘company proper’ had given up.

Watching RIM bellow out news that is designed to stabilize (not working) the market and public perception, I chuckled when Lazaridis told the media they were “priming Heins” (yeah right) for the CEO position for a long while because of his long track record in operations and other skills. Really?  What a bunch of crock.  The co-CEOs were forced out plain and simple and they picked someone “safe” who would “follow orders”. 

No one prepares a “successor” to fail and to clearly walk into a mess (was he really “fully” aware of how bad things really were? He had to have some “inkling”) to only then pass it all off to “bank advisors” to decide RIM’s strategic fate.

Bank advisors (vampires) are brought into to do a few things:

  • to partition off ip into sale-able chunks
  • protect shareholder/investor interests
  • to PROFIT

They are not going to try and “revive” the company.  That’s WORK.  HARD WORK.

Ironically, through all this RIM K-W hoopla, we learned that the co-CEOs will get their typical amazing payout for doing a fantastic job as the two-headed dragon.  Sorry, these guys don’t deserve respect for the latter part of their act.  They don’t come close to the “$1 CEO” (a.k.a. Steve Jobs) on performance but like other typical American executives in other crappy tech firms, they all get a nice golden parachute while the rest of the employees suffer in a shit-hole for their undivided dedication before they are summoned off with a news announcement of 20,000 layoffs. 

This is what is wrong with corporate North America.  In a post-2008 financial apocalyptic world, the coaches of corporate North America get fired like they do in sports with some great benefits.  Ironically, this entitlement business doesn’t apply to peons.  No, in the mainstream media, peons demanding any reasonable entitlement is looked upon as some kind of vampire feeding session that is fashionable making for “justifiable off-shoring” of business operations (read: productive inputs called labour) to keep costs under extreme control.

But let’s not restrict Corporate North America from ridiculous entitlements because surely, they deserve it for the terribly bad performance of late and for their easy operational decisions to cut jobs to keep shareholders happy.  Look, it’s unfortunate when it does happen to lower rank and file.  Job layoffs are a fact of life today. However, it is really unfortunate when it happens to the same rank and file because of repeated bad decisions made by the same corporate executives.  Some will argue that the market penalizes executives who run a bad game of baseball.  In some cases, yes.  In other cases, not so much because of their deep networks and other entangled alliances.  Steve Jobs set the bar with his $1 salary strategy and very few others have done the same.  And shocker, Steve didn’t even have to do it on the basis of some sloppy IPO and wobbly business model that smells like dump.

RIM’s situation is truly sad. It’s easy to confirm from within the company that management had become nepotistic, hiring idiots and morons to run as VP’s (“dead wood”) of whatever, while the front-lines with the necessary smarts and know-how to “get things done” got shit on nicely.  Annoying and unnerving at best.  Go visit Boy Genius Report for more than a few stories on this. 

The absolute arrogance of the co-CEOs (don’t forget the board of directors too - useless twits then and now) to new entrants simply highlights how disconnected they had become to the real happenings of the world.  However, they were not the only ones!  Nokia and Microsoft’s Ballmer displayed the same arrogance and now eat apples daily to keep the doctor away.  Even Apple after Jobs 1 (1985) was pathetically arrogant until Microsoft consolidated its strategy around OEM/VAR channels to launch Windows95 to beat Apple at the GUI (graphic user interface game) at a time when Apple had unraveled with bad management policies and O/S strategy under Sculley, Spindler and Amelio.

See this cool segment on Steve Jobs and NeXT (which would SAVE Apple under Job 2)

Now we get wind to the latest news from industrial technology wasteland that RIM could be sold in parts.  Not surprising as this was obvious at the time of the announcement that JP Morgan and RBC were brought on.

The current theories include:

  • Sell the hardware unit to Amazon or Facebook
  • Sell the messaging platform to Apple and Google

Hello???????  This is the death of RIM.  None of this ever works.  If true, RIM is dead on arrival and whatever valiant efforts had been made to turn the ship around with BB10 will have been for naught.  Talk about Foreplay!

Yes, I am livid that co-CEOs, management and a crappy board of directors allowed this to happen to another Canadian technology company.  It’s something that needs to be analyzed carefully in the halls of Canadian government the next time they offer up SRED tax credits and other bundles of taxpayer joy to the next startup.  More IP loss in the works in the True North Strong and Free.

If you don’t believe me that splits don’t work, let’s look at the bipolar disorder of these “happy” breakups.

  1. Palm (Read here)
  2. Motorola (Read here)

Most Notable on the Palm saga:

It wasn’t always this complicated. In an earlier life as one combined Palm Inc., the two companies created and dominated the market for handheld devices. But in a saga that involves some of the tech world’s largest personalities and opportunities both seized and lost, Palm split into two companies that are now facing increasingly divergent futures.

Whatever becomes of RIM, if the company can release BB10 flawlessly, this could be the one last chance the company has to stave off the trifecta feast by the piranhas better known as media, markets and consumers. 

It’s up to you to decide which part is the caramel and which part is the sundae.  God Speed RIM.  Dedicated to the people who really fought hard for the enterprise while the two pigs at the top fattened up with corn to prepare for the dark winters to come.  Great Job Balsillie and Lazaridis - you earned every penny of your golden parachute while you lined up the rest of your folks and S.W. Ontario for the great economic downfall — simply because you were too arrogant to change.

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Source: thestar.com

MOBILE: SOFTWARE WON. Plain and Simple.

What a week.

The latest?  Nokia expected to cut 10,000 additional jobs by 2013 and cut out some research and development in Burnaby, BC and Ulm, Germany.

This isn’t really anything new.  When Steve Jobs II returned, he immediately slashed and burned.  Specifically, R&D.  He then killed the Newton (his disdain for John Sculley evident - it wasn’t his baby, so bye bye Newton).  He killed off a million Macintosh models and simplified the Apple product matrix into Prosumer and Consumer and split between desktops and laptops.  Wow, what a different time we live in.  Now, cloud services, content and thin clients drive the strategy.

Missed in all of this “noise” about struggling brands like the former Palm (WebOS), RIM, Windows Phone, Nokia and HP (WebOS acquisition) is that software has truly won.  It’s all about the software. Yes, software is the lion in the wild.  Lazaridis, with RIM still, believed that the best speakerphone technology on RIM Blackberry’s would drive unit sales.  A smart perfectionist, yes, but not a realist. In some way, not really different than Steve Jobs except that Steve picked the smarter battles.

When Jobs was ousted from Apple c. 1985, “nimby” took over.  Better known as “not invented in my backyard”, it was the prevailing “wisdom” at Apple and the Achilles heel to success.  That arrogance polluted Apple for a greater part of twelve years until Steve Jobs returned. “Nimby” also polluted Research in Motion, infected Ballmer and Microsoft as well as Nokia proper.  Imagine the mindset of these tier-1 brands in 2007?   Both RIM and Nokia stood out by mocking Apple with “good luck” inferences with its iPhone product launch.  In most cases, like Dell, all phone competitors simply said Apple should focus on computers but Apple knew that mobile would become the revenue king for the coming decades.  Both companies poo-pooed Apple’s entry into the “phone” market.

Microsoft was probably the most arrogant.  Here’s Ballmer:

It’s truly hard to watch arrogance in full motion.  When you’re big, fat, and slow…you’re arrogant.  Arrogance is the warning sign when you should REALLY be very afraid.  It’s just sad to see.  Under Gassee and Spindler, Apple’s arrogance and blindness was so bad that they thought they could save themselves but ended up with Amelio, someone with National Semiconductor stripes but oddly, way out of place for a company like Apple.  No way — it was horrid.  Thankfully, Steve Jobs came back through a NeXT software acquisition to give Apple its new operating system software strategy that had plagued the company for so long: Pink, Taligent (with IBM), Star Trek and Copland.

And herein lies the message.  Jobs came back to Apple as a result of a software acquisition.  NeXT as a company did not succeed as a hardware company focused on targeting enterprise and universities.  It was the object-oriented NeXTstep software that Apple wanted.  This acquisition was a coup d’etat in the making.  In it, the world would benefit with the powerful OSX and iOS variants for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. 

Apple won because of software.  While everyone else spent their entire R&D on hardware engineering, Apple rebounded because of agile software strategy, coupled with great hardware engineering and product design to explode unit sales.  As well, Apple under Tim Cook (operations extraordinaire) benefited from cost and operational efficiencies like no other major technology company had experienced. Apple’s passion for design won the customer but Apple’s marketing spoke about experience - which could only come from software U/X.

Apple’s early ads about the MacOS spent more time informing consumers that a MacOS upgrade was like having a new Macintosh computer. It was always about software. Hardware was/IS important. That said, even Jonathan Ive spoke about the iPhone on the basis of software:  All activity defers to the screen.  To Jony, the screen is the operating system. Yes, the hardware and touch gesture technology drive the user experience; but ultimately, the U/X (user experience) is driven by the software. In this case, iOS.

Sadly, no one beyond Apple figured this one out.  OK, Android did after Apple.  RIM spent all of its time on hardware technology, battery efficiency, radio technology, network efficiency and security .  Nokia, as well.  Yes, even Palm Inc. and Microsoft with early iterations of WinCE and Windows Phone 5 & 6.  While these companies made “software attempts”, most of them focused on hardware versus software.

If we really think about it…Apple is a software services engineering firm.  The Mac GUI has been the centrepiece of attention and focus since Apple’s 1984 revolution.  It certainly was NOT about the Mac (box) in a backpack.  No one else got it.  Steve Jobs did.  Now…everyone is suffering as a result while Apple seamlessly scales more products, more services, and more utility to a discerning audience. 

Competitors are facing internal bloodshed as they re-architect their business to software strategy and engineering. But, competition is a good thing.  Let’s hope they survive.

I added a link to Harvard Business Review at the end of this article which claims that Nokia’s current mess is tied to “ignoring America”.  Get over yourself HBR.  Such American arrogance isn’t necessary. 

NO.  NOKIA IGNORED SOFTWARE.  That’s why they panicked and went with Windows Phone because Symbian had been a disaster for much too long. 

RIM is facing the same challenge but I am confident that BB10 will be a far better value proposition to end users than the end result which is Nokia.  May Nokia survive as I have been a huge fan for a long time.

Source: blogs.hbr.org