3 ms·
I have a personal anecdote that says otherwise. A startup I was working with in 2009 was developing a mobile solution for the healthcare space. Our initial tar
by kkielhofner 3y ago
I have a personal anecdote that says otherwise.
A startup I was working with in 2009 was developing a mobile solution for the healthcare space. Our initial target was iPhone (yes, extremely early and that’s a post for another day).
We met with some mid-level executives at RIM (Waterloo is cool, BTW). They obviously had the intention of us leading with RIM devices.
That said, when we would talk about the iPhone they had overwhelming confidence and a superiority complex I haven’t encountered since. They were calling the iPhone a toy and going so far as to heap a palatable amount of disrespect on us for even considering it. Like we were complete idiots for not seeing the obvious future where BlackBerry continued to be reigning champ in the market and the iPhone would never grow up.
They got comfortable and just didn’t take the iPhone seriously, story as old as time.
- passive 3y agoI think we're describing aspects of the same problem. The Waterloo core of the company was generally very successful with what it was focused on, so if you never got your head out of that bubble, you might assume things were going just as well elsewhere. There was definitely a lot of cockiness in the executives at the time, but it takes more than that to sink a company, as modern times have emphasized heavily. I can promise you that internally there was a ton of energy directed at competing with the iPhone. But RIM would have floundered against Android in the same way, because the company culture never scaled out of Waterloo.