>>“The problem wasn’t that we stopped listening to customers,” said one former RIM insider. “We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than the

>>“The problem wasn’t that we stopped listening to customers,” said one former RIM insider. “We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did. Consumers would say, ‘I want a faster browser.’ We might say, ‘You might think you want a faster browser, but you don’t want to pay overage on your bill.’ ‘Well, I want a super big very responsive touchscreen.’ ‘Well, you might think you want that, but you don’t want your phone to die at 2 p.m.’ “We would say, ‘We know better, and they’ll eventually figure it out.’ ” Seems like they never stopped to think beyond the existing limitations, and what people would put up with for a better experience with the phone. Incumbents [1] tend to imagine that the problems they have identified (and decided to be unsolvable at the moment) are unsolvable for any newcomer too. 1. Motorola had tried touchscreen smartphones before [2] and they had failed. They did not understand at the time that the reason for the failure was not because users did not want touchscreen phones, but because their implementation broke no new ground. It was simply an archaic OS running on a touchscreen that required a stylus. 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_A1000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_A1000