Corvus Consulting

I’ve been watching reviews of RIM’s Playbook keenly, not because I particularly want one but because I’m curious to see how this company faces what is now clearly a turning point in its life. Pressure has been building up on RIM to deliver something that reinvigorates its place in the market as an innovator and leader, having coasted for almost a decade on its early product language and culture.

The reviews are easy enough to find. The consensus: there’s real promise in the Playbook, but it’s been shipped half-baked, rushed out with a list of promises as long as its list of debut features. Taking a step back, the only question I’m left with is ‘why’?

Why did RIM feel it had to ship in April? In the tablet market there’s only one real entry so far: the Xoom is a flop, the PalmOS devices are still in development, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab offerings are amusing snoozers as well. Nobody gives a hoot about any of the iPad’s competitors; so, RIM, what was the hurry?

Had RIM’s executives stopped hyperventilating in the press, they could have seen that they were racing to a party that’s really still getting under way. Apple’s lead is too far for Playbook 1 to come close to catching. By spending a a couple more months, maybe even just a few more weeks, they could have shipped a far stronger debut tablet and come out a strong first-among-second-place entries.

There’s a big chunk of the market that iPad is not right for: corporate types who trust and are invested with the Blackberry brand, people who want a smaller tablet, and nerds who want to hack around on the high-horsepower QNX operating system. It would still be there, not embracing the iPad, in say June or July. Instead of doing their best to serve that market with a complete product, RIM has been spooked into releasing early with something confusing and far less than it could be, getting them nothing but a fumbled launch and scattered, halting applause from a press desperate for a tablet worth talking about that doesn’t start with an i.

By way of Matthew Frederick’s excellent 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School (Amazon), I came across a Virginia Woolf quote that captures a kind of elemental truth about why some brands and products soar while others flop, despite having comparable or even better features.

The success of the masterpieces seems not to lie in their freedom from faults – indeed we accept the grossest faults in them all – but in the immense persuasiveness of a mind that has completely mastered it’s perspective.

When you look at which products are doing well and which are flailing, ask whether the people behind them have a sense of a mastered perspective. Look for it in marketing and political campaigns, in individual products and in brands. I suspect the answer will jump out clearly.

Last week an independent developer brought a storm of attention on the process of starting to make apps for RIM’s upcoming Playbook tablet. Over the weekend a RIM representative posted an open answer to the open letter on the Inside Blackberry Developer’s Blog, trying to do the right thing. The response, unfortunately, falls short and provides a good lesson for product managers and anyone else tasked with community relations.

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Two short tales landed in my view this past week that provide lessons on the difficulties of getting computers to take over complex problems in their entirety.

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Whenever Apple releases something, there’s a column of comment-thread critics pointing out that Apple didn’t invent the technologies behind the new product. Invention is rarely part of the value proposition that Apple makes in its products, preferring to pull together ideas in novel and refined ways.

While they clearly built on what was learned in building the iOS store, Apple was not the first to have an app store for their own platform. Well over a year ago, Bodega had launched just that. While innovative, their concept never really caught on and I didn’t hear much about Bodega after that.

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Fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are familiar with the Infinite Improbability Drive, a spacecraft engine fuelled by the energy of highly improbably events.

Fans of this blog (both of them) will be keen to learn about the Corvus Irony Timing Chain, which prevents me from writing year-in-review posts until a few days after New Years. The Chain makes space for the news that would have contradicted, enhanced or otherwise changed what I was going write. This exclusive innovation lets me write without having to look back on a post less than a week old and feel like a dupe.

Safely a few short steps into 2011, we can look back on 2010 for what it was: an exciting year that delivered a number of inflection points.

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