I often wonder what Research in Motion is going to do with their business. They are a great company who reinvented the smart-phone business before the iPhone arrived – but right now they are in a lot of trouble. RIM are still generating staggering amounts of revenue ($19bn last year on $4bn of profit) but they are at a dead end. I believe they are ripe for takeover or a private equity deal. They are where Apple was in 1997, when Microsoft was dominating in software and Dell, Compaq and HP in hardware. Apple however, managed to rebuild themselves and have staged a triumphant return of monolithic proportions. In 1997 Apple was not in the NASDAQ-100′s top 10. By 2010 Apple accounted for over 20% of the entire NASDAQ index.
Here is an amazing video of Apple’s WDC conference in 1997, with a unique open Q&A chaired by a much younger Steve Jobs.
It is incredible how a company was able to turn itself around in such a short period of time and to innovate with the pace and attention to detail that they have. RIM are faced with a similar challenge.
Some quotes that I liked:
Guy in the audience: What do we do about the press? The Wall St Journal guys have been reporting sell Apple short, and go write stories about us. It’s clear it’s perception versus reality probably, they don’t know shit about operating systems, they don’t know shit about tools, they don’t know whats going on in the future…
Jobs: If the press is selling Apple short, I would buy some shares, that is what I have done!
Jobs: Perhaps this notion of being so proprietary in everything we do has hurt us. The management and vision we have has encouraged us to be this way.
In 1997, Jobs had already understood that Apple required radical change to stop inventing everything themselves, and to use open standards that were readily available. In 2005 Apple announced their transition to Intel. He was 8 years ahead of himself.
Jobs: Much of the great leverage of using computers these days is not just for computational intensive tasks, but for communication intensive tasks. Never have I seen something so powerful as this computation combined with this network technology that we now have.
Of course he is talking about the internet.
Jobs: I have taken all of our local data, our home directories as we call them, and put them on a server. I have computers at Apple, at Next, at Pixar and at home. I walk up to any of them and log in as myself, it goes over the network, finds my directory on the server and I’ve got my stuff wherever I am. None of this is stored on my local hard disk.
Does this remind you of the cloud, drop box and the current trend of the web?
Hopefully RIM will get a second wind, as did Apple, however the Apple ecosystem and brand are particularly strong right now making this a very difficult position for RIM to be in, let alone Google.
Since exiting Lind Golf I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in the United States re-connecting with the tech scene and understanding the current trends inside and outside of e-commerce.
