Fill in the blank

The other day Voker Weber shared his thoughts about BlackBerry and he stated the following:

The sentiment. BlackBerry smells of old. People want new. iPhone. Maybe Android. Once people have made up their mind to divorce you, it’s a tough thing to turn around. It’s no longer good enough to be good enough. You have to be way better.

Now let me change the above to this:

The sentiment. ______________ smells of old. People want new. iPhone. Maybe Android. Once people have made up their mind to divorce you, it’s a tough thing to turn around. It’s no longer good enough to be good enough. You have to be way better.

Unfortunately, I can think of dozens of products and services that can be filled in the blank. The world has certainly changed over the last decade and sometimes no matter what a company and/or organization does, they can’t turn it around.

Shiny and new are the “new black”.

 

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Author: Bruce Elgort

You’ll find this technology professor – an award-winning instructor at Clark College – working hard to inspire and challenge his students with meaningful web development and programming experiences. With a skinny vanilla latte (no foam) in hand, Bruce loves to tinker and test the boundaries of existing and emerging technologies, to then guide hungry minds through memorable, educational journeys to showcase with passion the ever-evolving innovations of society. An industry leader, Bruce is known for co-developing Elguji’s IdeaJam software, and is recognized by IBM as an ‘IBM Champion’ for being an innovative thought leader in cloud technologies.

2 thoughts on “Fill in the blank”

  1. I think BlackBerry’s problems were/are multi-tiered, with the foul stench of stale technology being the common foundation. Microsoft’s in the same boat in mobile, and will likely be a continuing lesson (mostly because they’re likely to be in business longer than BlackBerry). It’s not just that their technology was old, but more importantly that they were institutionally incapable of seeing the problem for YEARS after it was clear to everyone else. Look at Android for the reverse story: in 2007, Android was a BlackBerry/Palm clone, looking ancient and designed for hardware keyboards and stylii. Google saw the writing on the wall immediately (well, ahead of time, with Eric Schmidt being on Apple’s board) and adjusted course appropriately. BB and MS kept fighting the same war they had been trying to fight for the previous decade, over territory that became irrelevant by default. In both cases, they eventually came around and released interesting new entries in the field, but by then they were essentially starting from scratch in a market dominated by new players with a huge head start and still with a better feel for the future.

  2. I think you’re right on target. A lot of the issue is increased consumerization of technology and the blurring of the lines between entertainment and data manipulation. Business technology is now evaluated as an extension of personal technology not primarily on how it does the business tasks.

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