Life hasn’t been good to RIM lately. The company is losing developers and major enterprise clients on a weekly basis. Its PlayBook tablet hasn’t made a dent in iPad sales (or even Android tablet sales, for that matter) and the company is practically begging Android developers to port their apps to the PlayBook. You’d expect the company to be frantic, particularly after the ousting of its co-CEOs last month… but that isn’t the case.
In one of the biggest delusions of grandeur that I’ve ever seen (which is saying something considering I was once the IT director for a mental health services agency), the company’s executives and board apparently think things are fine, that Apple is on the verge of death, and anyone outside the company is a moron. At least that’s the picture one RIM board member painted in an interview with Canada’s Globe and Mail recently.
While the entire article, titled Roger Martin: Defying RIMs critics, is worth reading, here are some of the highlights:
On the possibility of selling the company or licensing the BlackBerry brand
“So we’re supposed to hand it over to children, or morons from the outside who will destroy the company?” he says. “Or should we try to build our way to having succession?”
On competition from the iPhone:
“People were saying we can’t make powerful phones like Apple. Yes, we can, but we couldn’t believe consumers would put up with that kind of battery inefficiency and that kind of network inefficiency.”
On Apple as a business in the mobile space
“They ask ‘Why cant you be more like Apple?’ So we should go bankrupt and fire our founders and bring in a moron? That’s what we should do?”
On RIM’s former co-CEOs and RIM’s place in the mobile market
“And people just don’t understand the depth of understanding these guys have of their business, the connections, whatever.”
At the end of this piece, one thing seems pretty clear about the Waterloo, Ontario company to anyone with a passing knowledge of the mobile technology market and RIM’s precious place in it: the lunatics appear to be running the asylum.
