With this discussion in mind, a concrete case study is "When should RIM have pivoted?" When should they have invested most of their R&D into a developer friendl

With this discussion in mind, a concrete case study is "When should RIM have pivoted?" When should they have invested most of their R&D into a developer friendly ecosystem and committed to a well defined strategy like Samsung (a hardware company), Google (ad platform company) or Apple (hardware and content platform) company? I believe RIM is most similar to Apple, but would die a slow death from hardware development costs without the volume support, so should have pivoted and merged with NOKIA while both were strong to leverage RIM's enterprise software expertise with NOKIA's hardware development/manufacturing scale. The pivot occurs when you do the numbers and realize that to master both hardware and software is a rare feat of skill not worth embarking on unless you believe you can beat Apple at its own game.