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Speaking as an Ontarian with some familiarity with the Waterloo area, I strongly doubt that its rural location has anything to do with RIM’s problems. The “Goo

Speaking as an Ontarian with some familiarity with the Waterloo area, I strongly doubt that its rural location has anything to do with RIM’s problems. The “Good Old Boy” syndrome described can happen anywhere. The company is described as having 50-something executives who are out of touch making decisions. You can find hundreds of tech companies like this in Toronto, New York, Seattle, and SV. Some guys build a company, are successful, hire people just like them, times change, but they don’t change with it, and refuse to hire new blood. For a theory like this to be credible, it must explain RIM, but also explain other failures and successes. You can’t posit that Apple couldn’t have existed in Wisconsin and use that hypothetical as an example to bolster the reasoning that Apple couldn’t have existed in Wisconsin. My question is, how did Microsoft succeed in the PNW? And why is it no longer succeeding in quite the same way? I agree that Waterloo’s talent pool is interesting by virtue of UW, but not as deep as SV. Then again, lots of SV companies make these mistakes, so I think it’s more fruitful to look at the mistakes than to try to theorize about the environment somehow creating the mistakes, as if RIM would somehow be Apple if they had only relocated a decade ago.

hvs 15y ago
I'm not familiar with Waterloo, but I think/feel/assume that companies take on the culture of their executives, not necessarily their locales. Every company that I've worked for over the past 15-20 years has largely had the "personality" of its CEO and high-level executives. If they are aloof and dismissive of "the underlings", the company as a whole will be like that. I guess my point is that assholes can be anywhere, and a lot of them end up in executive positions. If they are also incompetent, they have a tendency to bring their companies down with them.
ChrisMac 15y ago
I live in Waterloo and also think it's a stretch to call it rural. Sure, it's not a metropolis, but there are about 500,000 people in the immediate region. Toronto, the country's largest city, is also only an hour-and-a-half drive away, along a well-worn, built up commuter route. Overall, South-Western Ontario is the most populous part of the country. I rarely feel like I'm out in the middle of nowhere. There's a definite sense that the city is in Toronto's sphere.
- deleted 15y ago
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- a3camero 15y ago
  Also, RIM isn't just in Waterloo. There's a fairly substantial Mississauga office that is in the Greater Toronto Area. RIM also has offices in Ottawa, the US and Britain.
mechanical_fish 15y ago
I, too, thought this griping about Ontario was beside the point - someone is working out their pet peeve. Did RIM move to southern Ontario after becoming a big success? If not, then isn't this talent pool that is now supposedly holding them back the same one that made them great in the first place? Businesses get disrupted. It happens, and it happens in much the same way everywhere.
randomdata 15y ago
I am from rural Ontario, about an hour's drive away from RIM. There seems to a disproportionate number of people skilled in high tech and design coming from my region. I've seen some pretty amazing work coming from these people. Technology and design was a strong part of the high school curriculum, which may explain the amount of talent we have. Our schools even had labs of SGI machines, when SGI was still a hot company, for design courses, which I think would have been fairly unheard of for most high schools at the time. So I believe the talent is out there, even in the rural areas. RIM is just doing a poor job of acquiring it.

hvs 15y ago

I'm not familiar with Waterloo, but I think/feel/assume that companies take on the culture of their executives, not necessarily their locales. Every company that I've worked for over the past 15-20 years has largely had the "personality" of its CEO and high-level executives. If they are aloof and dismissive of "the underlings", the company as a whole will be like that. I guess my point is that assholes can be anywhere, and a lot of them end up in executive positions. If they are also incompetent, they have a tendency to bring their companies down with them.

ChrisMac 15y ago

I live in Waterloo and also think it's a stretch to call it rural. Sure, it's not a metropolis, but there are about 500,000 people in the immediate region. Toronto, the country's largest city, is also only an hour-and-a-half drive away, along a well-worn, built up commuter route. Overall, South-Western Ontario is the most populous part of the country. I rarely feel like I'm out in the middle of nowhere. There's a definite sense that the city is in Toronto's sphere.

deleted 15y ago
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a3camero 15y ago
Also, RIM isn't just in Waterloo. There's a fairly substantial Mississauga office that is in the Greater Toronto Area. RIM also has offices in Ottawa, the US and Britain.

mechanical_fish 15y ago

I, too, thought this griping about Ontario was beside the point - someone is working out their pet peeve. Did RIM move to southern Ontario after becoming a big success? If not, then isn't this talent pool that is now supposedly holding them back the same one that made them great in the first place? Businesses get disrupted. It happens, and it happens in much the same way everywhere.

randomdata 15y ago

I am from rural Ontario, about an hour's drive away from RIM. There seems to a disproportionate number of people skilled in high tech and design coming from my region. I've seen some pretty amazing work coming from these people. Technology and design was a strong part of the high school curriculum, which may explain the amount of talent we have. Our schools even had labs of SGI machines, when SGI was still a hot company, for design courses, which I think would have been fairly unheard of for most high schools at the time. So I believe the talent is out there, even in the rural areas. RIM is just doing a poor job of acquiring it.