Blackberry / Nokia: Two Business Books

We are well aware of many colossal collapses in the business world, and they can occur in an accelerated way in the digital age - Netscape booms, then loses to IE and Firefox; Myspace is rapidly replaced by Facebook; Yahoo search loses to the Google monolith; Blockbuster caves in with the rise of web-based Netflix.   In the phone world, Motorola and Nokia dominated everything until they abruptly didn't.  Two new books profile the decline of Blackberry and Nokia. 

In Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry (2015), Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff tell the story of a small hardscrabble Canadian tech company called RIM that rose to the top of the mobile world.  Blackberries were conceived in the digital stone age when we had (A) PalmPilots that you sync'd in the morning with your PC and there were (B) two-way pagers with very limited text capabilities.  

RIM recognized there could be a huge untapped market for providing full and seamless high security email services on mobile devices.   The early BlackBerries didn't have phones at all.  Management was appalled when iPhones were introduced in 2007: because there wasn't enough bandwidth at carriers for all that internet access (there wasn't), because people wouldn't type on glass, and because the battery was pathetic - 10 hours not 2 days. 

BlackBerry avoided the internet like the plague for a while longer.  The company, despite its reputation and success, had always had a head-just-above-water approach to its global servers, and these collapsed a few times, damaging its reputation.  RIM then bungled several attempts at more modern smartphones and had delayed and sank R&D into misguided efforts like its Play tablet.  The "spectacular fall" ensured.  Some of RIM's most tightly held assumptions...that internet and corporate email access on iPhones would be difficult or impossible... proved completely wrong as the bring-your-own-device business world emerged a few years ago. 

In The Decline and Fall of Nokia (2015), David J. Cord tells a similar story.  Nokia dominated the global phone market as a miracle Finnish company that could do no wrong - $50B in sales and $7B profit in 2007, the year the iPhone was introduced.  It provided a massive range of devices, for the low, mid and high markets, all rapidly remodeled, and customized to each carrier.  The endless varities of phones ran on a diversely versioned operating system called Symbian.  Android grew rapidly with a completely different model - a one fits all open access operating system. 

As Cord points out, iPhone had one phone, one operating system, and was riding on top ofApple's booming success with iPods and iTunes.   Nokia declined rapidly, entering a death spiral by 2011/2012.  Just like RIM, trying to follow the iPhone, it began producing more sophisticated devices that didn't work well.  Attempts to break off Symbian with a proprietary new system, with MS-Windows, and with a Linux-like system all stumbled in turn.  

Lack of a common software platform for Nokia's phones made an iOS like "app and entertainment" ecosystem impossible, and the option of iPads using the same ecosystem made iOS even more attractive, as iPads and iPhones boomed together.

Eventually Nokia was (essentially) acquired by Microsoft, a transaction that soon generated a $7B writeoff.   After a share price peak of $230 around the time the iPhone was introduced, RIM fel to $50 in 2010/2011 and is at $8 today, where it has sat since 2012.

The stories, while different, reproduce at least three of the seven "Billion Dollar Lessons" cataloged by Carroll and Mui in their 2007 book  Billion Dollar Lessons: "Staying the Course [Threat? What Threat?]," "Fumbling Technology: Riding the Wrong Technology," and "Consolidation Blues: Doubling Down on a Bad Hand." 

Lessons for healthcare and digital health?  I'm going to think about that....It may be we have plenty of Blackberries and Nokias, but no killer iPhone to change the ecosystem.

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For a 12/2015 WSJ article on a new Android-based Blackberry, here.

For a 12/2015 InformationWeek article, "Blackberry: 8 Ways It Can Be Saved," here.

TRUMBO x 2

TRUMBO / Bryan Cranston / 2015 was initially not too high on my November movie list - I'm not a Bryan Cranston groupie - but I heard a podcast interview with the director and I caught it at midnight in NYC a few days ago.

While watching the Trumbo/2015, I was thinking "B" - a little wooden in the biopic way.  Also, part of the point is that Trumbo was a very unconventional protagonist - a grumpy abrasive egocentric.

However, interestingly, the movie grew on me in the days since and I dragged my teenage daughters to it.  And I'm discussing it in this blog.

Doing a bit of research on Trumbo, you'll also come across a 2007 documentary also called TRUMBO (dir Peter Askin) which is a few dollars VOD on Amazon or even for free on Youtube.   It was amazing.   It's partly narrative, partly talking heads of his children and a few elders who knew him, vintage video, and interspersed heavily with readings of Trumbo's letters by a wide case of excellent actors - Brian Dennehy, Nathan Lane, Michael Douglas, Donald Sutherland.  Some of the readings (actor desk and black background, Charlie Rose style) are just jaw dropping.  

Dalton Trumbo was a native Coloradan, became a novelist in the early 30s, and by the early 40s was Hollywood's highest paid screenwriter, a millionair living on a ranch an hour or two north of LA.  He was also a communist, cheering on every strike etc.   The communist card backfired rapidly in '47, '48.  He was one of the Hollywood 10 and spent a year in jail for contempt of Congress in 1950 after losing a lot of money on legal appeals.  As the movie tells it, he learned he could write bottom-barrel cheap scripts under assumed names and ran a hectic business, nearly working himself to death in the mid 50s.  One of his scripts, Roman Holiday, won an Academy Award (under the name of a friend), as did another (under a fake name).  Emboldened, he began playing with the press rather than hiding from it.   Around 1960, two blockbuster films appeared with his name as screenwriter (Exodus, Spartacus), and the blacklist was ended, at least for him.  John F. Kennedy famously crossed an anti communist picket line to attend Spartacus.  Trumbo soon wrote other noteworthy films, like Papillon.

Returning to the current 2015 Bryan Cranston movie, if you look past the sounds of wheels turning (1953...rip...1954...rip...1955...fight with wife...rip...teen daughter upset...escapades with contraband scripts...rip)...

...You get the following four kinds of goodness:

* History of the period.  For example, you see that the original HUAC actually investigated communists, whereas by McCarthyism they were just throwing completely ungrounded threats around, sort of like watching the progression of behavior over a couple years in Animal Farm...

* Character development. From dilettante pro-strike millionaire by his pool and horse stables, to prison inmate to starving guy trying to feed his family.

* A Classic Moral: Guy fights to change system, wins.

* Comic relief: Several showpiece scenes with John Goodman as a sleazy C-picture producer.

• Net-net, both Trumbo/2015 and Trumbo/2007 were wonderful experiences to watch.

Introverts/Extroverts Assessed

Introverts and extroverts are two different personality types that bring distinct, but complementary, skills to all sorts of business and social situations.  Both types are common all over the world, and equally distributed among men and women.   In both business and political situations, either extroverts or introverts can be successful leaders.   Intriguingly, recent research shows that introverts can equal the success of extroverts even in jobs like sales.   Great novelists have come from both personality types.  In short, it's not either/or or "better than" but rather both personality types contribute to a diverse and well functioning society.

Extroverts would never figure this out, because they can't slow down enough to think things through carefully.