Smart phones and dumb phones

I was sitting on the plane on my way back from San Diego reading my email on an iPhone, the guy next to me was doing the same thing on a Blackberry. We were both passively asocial and didn't care much about socializing, as I watched him with my peripheral vision typing on the keyboard I remembered the days when Blackberry was the ultimate device – a phone, PDA, you can read your email and maybe look at a web page or stock quotes. I vividly remember the first Blackberry I had – it did not even have a speaker, required a headset but it was totally worth the hassle – I could get my email and contacts on it. A real "smart" phone, helps you stay connected and get some work done even on the road. Fast forward 5–6 years, the Blackberry can still do the same things but not much more. Can't play Pandora, there's no Angry Birds, doesn't have touch screen, the screen resolution makes you squint. Next to an iPhone (or WinMo7 or Android phone) the Blackberry looks antiquated, outdated, something from the past century. It suddenly turned into a "dumb" phone. 

What happened over the past several years? Research In Motion (the markers of Blackberry) just fell asleep at the wheel. They stopped innovating and resorted to mediocracy and incremental improvement of their product; in the meantime, Apple, Google and Microsoft leapfrogged them, both as product and business model. RIM never really believed that third-party developers can provide value and did not launch an app store. Deploying Blackberries for enterprise required software (Blackberry Enterprise Server) and a lot of configuration work. What a nightmare! It takes about 5 minutes to configure your iPhone or WinMo7 to synchronize with your corporate email (or personal) email and does not require anyone to do anything. The same thing (almost) happened to Microsoft – I personally like WinMo7 very much because of it's usability and innovative UI. It is also very solid platform with great developer ecosystem (don't want to stir up a debate on this one). It was just several years too late, Microsoft stopped innovating after WinMo6.5, which had serious usability, stability and battery life issues, not to mention complete absence of 3rd party applications. The same thing happened to Nokia, it just took a little longer – 20 years ago Nokia ruled the mobile market, today one cannot find a Nokia phone anywhere in the US except in the "old electronics" drawers. 

What I am making out of this is that mediocracy, complacency and averageness is no longer an option for a company, if it wants to last more than one product lifecycle (a.k.a. "one-trick pony"). With product life cycles becoming shorter and shorter, much faster adoption and zero switching costs there is absolutely no time to relax and bug fix a product. Consumers are becoming more and more willing to adopt "early" releases, not get upset over incomplete functionality, minor bugs, defects and outages, which makes it even easier and more compelling to take market share from the incumbent players. 

If I were an incumbent player I would be seriously worried both about my customers and my talent – most good engineers thrive on building new products, not on spending weeks fixing minor bugs or releasing incremental features. It gets depressing to work for a company that is coasting on the laurels of their past achievements. One thing for sure is that I don't want to work there, nor are the people I want to work with. I have been fortunate to work for and with some exceptional individuals that defeat common sense – they "made it" at one point or another and don't have to worry about working ever again but they still work harder than 99% of the rest. Why is that – they just don't accept mediocracy as an option. Such people are also very polarizing – they have contagious, motivating and exhilarating impact on some, while others think they are just being difficult and demanding. Both sides are right – achieving great results is both difficult and inspiring. To bring this back to the Blackberry conversation – if I were in a business which is open to global competition I will be hiring some of the "difficult" people as quickly as I can. You can easily tell who they are.