Thundernewt in Seoul

Before the iPhone, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry owned the smartphone segment.  They did it by remarkably implementing the product that was remarkably envisioned by their founders, then pursuing enterprise sales as the strategy for achieving traction and phenomenal growth.

Enter Apple.

Apple took the incredible foresight of BlackBerry, and added consumer focus… and consumer focus is what I believe gave Apple its incredible advantage of BlackBerry in that critical first battle for mobile platform supremacy that reached beyond enterprise, where inefficient decisions were made by gatekeepers who were influenced by pesky (persistent? helpful?) sales people like me. Research in Motion maintained a formidable fleet of conmen oops, guys who would get you drunk to sign a contract oops, salesmen to keep just the right amount of variable-but-constant pressure on not only decision makers and influencers in enterprise, but also on decision makers and influencers at telecom companies, and among those who make government policy. RIM was definitely one of those companies were you had to drink the company’s generously spiked Kool Aid.

Focusing on the gatekeepers is a recipe for market inefficiency.  In enterprise sales, what’s right rarely matters.  What persuades the gatekeeper(s) to bless your product and sign the damn contract does matter.  And that invariably leads to striving to please That Guy who, in most cases, is probably not as smart as he should be, at least in the area where the sly salesman is pushing for him to make a decision.  In the worst cases, it can even lead to shadiness in the form of elaborate gifts or outright bribes.

Focusing on the end users is hard.  End users often don’t know what they want.  You can’t bribe all the end users. (Or can you?)  But if you’re Steve Jobs, you *tell them* what they want. And they listen.

RIM was comfortable with its proximity and relationship to the gatekeepers.  It made them lazy and complacent.  Further, it gave them a distorted worldview… like, say, Paris Hilton?  Or, worse, Gadaffi?  Or, perhaps more realistically, Dick Cheney?  My point is, RIM associated itself, its product development, and its go-to-market strategy too much with the halls of power and those who reside within them.  They lost touch with what people want when they’re not making decisions for thousands of their underlings.