The Anatomy of Mobile Failure: RIM, Nokia, Microsoft

Galen Gruman on the failure of mobile products from RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia:

RIM particularly played up its cozy relationship with security- and control-minded CIOs who would never let such toys into the enterprise. Nokia and Microsoft had the same paternalistic, insular point of view. (Dell’s story is more like that of the OEMs—I’ll get to that shortly.)

They were talking to the wrong people. CIOs and IT managers are generally conservative, risk-averse, and traditionalist—especially at large companies and even moreso at regulated ones. In their worldview, change is bad, and so is user freedom. These Neanderthal IT leaders are a lagging indicator of what’s really going on. They dismissed the PC, the Internet, and e-commerce, too. But betting on them—and the large checks they kept writing—let RIM, Nokia, and Microsoft blindly traipse into irrelevance.

It’s a great Saturday read.

[Macworld]