CrackBerry User
|   Originally Posted by OzarkaTexile  RIM is much better positioned today than Apple was in their darkest days. Let's call the Apple low in 1997 with the Wired "Pray" cover. (Notice that most of the advice was wrong, or at least not the path Apple took.) Feature
But is RIM at their low point yet? I think so. BB10 looks like their last shot and it's difficult to imagine them blundering the first generation BB10 phone and having another chance. RIM's problem with BB10 is that it appears to be just catching up with Android and iOS. At some point, they'll need to lead. That link is fascinating. And actually, most of his points on the front page were spot-on, and match very precisely what Apple did:
1. Admit it. You're out of the hardware game.
Not this one 
3. Start pampering independent software vendors.
X-Code brought the development environment in-house and reduced reliance on Metroworx. The App stores followed.
4. Gil Amelio should steal a page from Lee Iacocca's book - work for one year without a salary, just to inspire the troops.
Gil was gone, but Jobs worked for years on a $1 salary (plus a half-billion dollar jet, of course).
5. Straighten out the naming convention.
Done: MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac Pro, iPod, iPhone, iPad.
6. Apologize.
Didn't happen.
7. Don't disappear from the retail chains.
No one can deny that Apple stayed in Retail, in a big way.
8. Buy a song.
"She Comes in Colors" comes to mind, for the second-generation iMacs.
9. Fire the people who forecast product demand.
Jobs hired Cook, the Master of the Universe of logistics.
10. Get a great image campaign.
Their "Think Different" campaign was so memorable, that RIM is still trying to score points off it, TEN YEARS after the last "Think Different" ad ran.
11. Instead of trying to protect your multicolored [redacted] all the time, try looking forward.
No company is more ruthless about cannibalizing their own products.
12. Build a fire under your ad agency.
See above.
13. Exploit every Wintel user's secret fear that some day they're going to be thrown into a black screen with a blinking C-prompt.
"I'm a Mac. And I'm a PC."
14. Do something creative with the design of the box and separate yourselves from the pack.
"Designed in California for Apple."
15. Dump (or outsource) the Newton, eMate, digital cameras, and scanners.
Done.
16. Take better care of your customers.
Year after year topping customer satisfaction surveys.
17. Build some decent applications.
Webkit, Keynote, iTunes (<< which people love to complain about, but which is nearly ubiquitous on Macs and PCs these days.) Not to mention OS X.
So it seems that of James Daly's first 17 points, Apple followed 15 of them pretty closely.
The takeaway, to me, is that "advertising" is only, at most, three points out of fifteen. New software is one out of fifteen.
There are others, farther down the list: "Make a laptop that weighs 2 pounds," and "Port the OS to Intel," and "Continue your research in voice recognition" that are prescient.
Anyone who thinks that RIM will magically turn around on BB10 + an ad campaign does not understand how this works. BB10 will be vital; advertising will be vital; but there is a much, much longer road ahead. (And the advertising has to be about a million times better than anything we've seen so far.)
For Apple, it took fifteen years from the time of that article to the present. And Jim Daly deserves a crown for the almost-unheard-of feat of "Tech Journalism that Makes Predictions that Are Not Totally Wrong."
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