Altaf Shaikh

Earlier this month, I read an article about Research in Motion, or RIM as most people know it – the company that designs and manufactures the Blackberry brand of smartphones and tablets… and the guys who used to be the leaders in the booming world of mobile devices. The article was entitled “The Real Reason There Was No Email on the BlackBerry PlayBook” and it made me stop to take a look, since I used to be an avid Blackberry user. The gist of the article, and the huge underlying issue for Blackberry – is that they designed a product that won’t let them use an email address on more than one device. They’ve seemingly backed themselves into a corner.

Back when Blackberry first designed their operating system for mobile devices, the Blackberry team could not begin to fathom a day when a user would want or need to access their email from more than one mobile device, ever… and that is how they set up their operating system architecture. 1 email user = 1 device. No room for add-ons.

Now, I’m not saying that I would have been any better at projecting that users would want to access anything from multiple mobile devices, let along native email… but then again I’m not a smartphone manufacturer, I’m an emarketer so my radar is pointed in a whole different direction. Either way, I still think there’s a lesson to be learned here:

Technology moves fast, and it doesn’t help that it’s cyclical – technology pushes consumers to want new technologies and devices, and the consumers push back with new wants and desires that push technology further forward. Within this, we’ve seen many companies thrive and many more rise to the top and then give up the lead due to some “minor detail” that turned out to be a pretty major one.

Though it’s impossible to tell what the “minor detail” may end up being, I think it’s important to learn from the companies that keep evolving versus the companies that may internally resist the evolution revolution. It seems to me that the companies that grow the best listen to all ideas and allow many to contribute, they reinvent themselves the fastest, and they don’t spend time trying to resuscitate ideas-gone-bad.

Though I don’t know for sure what will happen with RIM/Blackberry, I can say that their problem really made me stop and think: How could they have seen this sooner? What could they have done differently?

Maybe those questions are too hard to answer yet, but the lesson that we are watching unfold with RIM is intrinsically tied to all business: adapt and evolve.

Let’s see how they react, and learn from their next moves.

Full story on Blackberry Playbook, and its missing native email support.