snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Makes the mess at Nokia seem like a major success.
(Aren't they now back to 2/3 of the market they had before they killed symbian for selling too poorly)
Struggling BlackBerry launched a bold bid back in 2010 to corner the Chinese smartphone market through a joint venture, but despite significant interest from Beijing internal feuding in the company ended up scuppering a deal, it is claimed. In summer 2010, Research In Motion chairwoman Barbara Stymiest and then co-CEO Jim …
I didn't think Symbian was killed because it wasn't selling well. It was killed because at source-code level it had become an unmaintainable labyrinthine monster that couldn't be updated with new features at the rate necessary to compete with iShiny's and the like. Nokia were taking about 18 months to develop new phone models because it was so bad.
That certainly would have meant it would have stopped selling well pretty shortly, mind you.
Co-CEO Mike Laziridis and other directors were apparently concerned that a possible China deal would distract the firm from the launch of its BlackBerry 10 device.
So if 2 and a half years late is what it took to get BB10 on sale when they weren't distracted, how long would it have taken to get to market if they had been? Would we need to get Stephen Hawking in come up with some new theory of time dilation in order to find out...
I guess this answers the question about how good an idea joint CEOs is. I can remember reading many articles, when they'd gone to that system, and were still riding high on past glory. Saying what a great idea it was, and how it lead to better leadership. Perhaps I won't be reading many of those types of stories for a while. Or of course it could be your standard post-crisis public arse covering.
Remember how many of Blair and Brown's ministers privately opposed some of their more disastrous decisions. But after heroic resistance behind closed doors, followed by intense private agony over whether to resign and carry on the fight in public - they were all sadly defeated. Oh, you don't remember that either? Funny, one might almost think they weren't recalling events 100% accurately...
"Would we need to get Stephen Hawking in come up with some new theory of time dilation in order to find out..."
I think it's already known that the time taken to develop a product is a function of the size of the CEO's ego; if it's sufficiently large then time stands still inside the "non event horizon" and is rapidly outstripped by developments the real (time) world.