As 2011 winds to a close and 2012 begins, we do a little bit of Fast Company drumbeating. We predict a lot of stuff around here. Sometimes we're wrong. But we also nailed a few things this year. Let's talk about shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and ... RIM's big failures...
"'The time has come,' The Walrus said, to talk of many things," is a line you may recognize from a Lewis Carroll nonsense poem, one that continues with the fabulously apposite phrase, "and whether pigs have wings."
Looking at the saga of RIM (once a champion of smartphone innovation) this year you'd be forgiven for thinking it ripe for a nonsense poem all of its own, and for pondering if pigs may fly before it recovers. We said as much in October, suggesting "RIM Needs To Stop Researching And Get Its BBM, A** In Motion." On the eve of its yearly developer conference, and in the immediate wake of a sequence of global service failures that lost it much consumer support--not least because of the odd way RIM's PR effort handled the affair--we suggested, "Clearly RIM needs to get itself properly in motion and heading in the right direction. Otherwise, a Nokia-like fate awaits the company."
Almost continuously since this article, Research In Motion has been in the headlines for one reason or another...most of them negative. In mid-December RIM reported pretty stable quarterly finances, but predicted a fourth quarter that was so soft that analysts and industry figures immediately worried--and shares slid further in value. Those shares have lost about 70% of their value since RIM debuted its disastrous PlayBook tablet in early 2011. But then the firm said it was delaying its next-gen phones, the ones with the purportedly iOS-rivaling QNX-based operating system until late 2012--a full five years and more after Apple's iPhone launched.
That operating system was to be called BBX, breaking with RIM tradition, but RIM even lost a lawsuit for the brand, and just recently the firm was hit with anoth...
[Source: Fast Company]
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