Originally Posted by
Troy Tiscareno Mike is who built BB... but Mike is also who brought BB to its knees.
Mike got tunnel-visioned, and once tunneled in, he couldn't see the rest of the world around him, and refused to accept the changes that were happening in the industry until it was WAY (YEARS!) too late - and in the ultra-fast-moving world of mobile, being DAYS late is enough to lose billions.
Mike insisted on making all the decisions, and created a corporate culture where "Mike is Right" and no one would ever tell him otherwise. In the beginning, when Mike understood the problems of the day, he did very well (he's a very smart guy), but once he got tunneled in, he lost touch and, as the Brits say, "lost the plot."
Mike should have had a new, advanced OS under way once the first rumors of Apple getting into the smartphone business started going around (2005). He absolutely should have been focusing a good portion of his workday on it when Apple gave a date for its introduction in 2007 (Apple wasn't a company that could be ignored, and that's doubly true if they're entering YOUR business). Even if those opportunities were squandered, there is absolutely ZERO excuse for Mike not having met with his staff on June 30, 2007 (the day after the iPhone official announcement) to create a new department to begin development of a new OS.
Instead, Mike had lots of excuses about how the carriers wouldn't allow it and how it would never work. Mike is the same guy that told Verizon that they shouldn't bother with LTE, and to stay with 3G! He simply couldn't change, and had convinced himself that his solutions to 2002's mobile data problems were the only way forward in 2007. Needless to say he was completely unprepared to meet Verizon's demand for a phone that was competitive with the iPhone, and when the Storm was released, it was a colossal failure that caused massive damage to BB's reputation with the carriers - and Verizon especially, who lost a billion dollars on the Storm.
It was Mike who pushed Android into Verizon's arms - prior to that, Android had been a boutique OS on the smallest US carrier at the time (T-Mobile). The Verizon relationship is what really launched Android.
And how can anyone seriously say that the Playbook was a great product at launch? The Playbook was essentially a dumb screen extender for BBOS, sold at the price of a larger, full-fledged, independent tablet (iPad). Without a BBOS device, it was completely useless. The sales numbers tell that story - they couldn't move inventory without a firesale and a $1B writedown. Again, thanks to Mike's lack of vision.
I totally appreciate Mike's focus on security and privacy (believe it or not), but in order to have any hope of success, he had to be in the game by 2009, or 2010 at the very latest, with a modern, advanced phone OS, which means he'd have had to start work on that OS in 2007. But by 2010, he was just buying an OS that was to be the foundation for his new smartphone OS - WAY too late to be relevant. When you move the 3-year development window over to 2010, you get a product launch on 2013, after the competition has had a 6-7 year head start. BB was already way out of the game when BB10 launched - thanks to Mike.
Yes, BB10 is a great OS, but a great OS with no userbase and no ecosystem is a failed product. Many people correctly predicted the outcome back in 2010 (heck, Kevin wrote a story here in 2009 saying the same thing) - and urged BB to adopt Android then. Even with the security problems it might have had at the time, BB could have, by now, had 5 years of working (with Google and/or independently) to fix those problems, and they'd have been able to sell to consumers and enterprises alike without a massive investment in a failed platform, years of lost sales, etc. BB might well still be the king of business smartphones today.
The very idea that Mike was "right all along" is delusional, and completely ignores the massive harm Mike did to the company he built.