Rim is doomed. Can you see why? A focus on a product and engineering cannot compete with an ecosystem.
The industrial era is also failing because it makes it focus on a specific product or service and then keeps engineering away to make it cost less while at the same time making the structural investment so high as to be impossible to exit. So we kill the newsroom and keep the paper. We have to milk the product until there is nothing left - HP and the PC.
What Steve Jobs and the team at Apple have done is to assemble an ecosystem. Much of the resources come freely to Apple and us the users from people who are attracted into playing in Steve's place. This is why Apple can trash a quite new product and so keep on the leading edge. They don't have to milk it until it is dead.
HP and Rim have only a spent business and nowhere to go now. But they also have all the costs that they added on to run those products.
The Ford Model (The 1903 Logo) was the winner for 100 years. It scaled vertically based on a product.
Apple and others who use the Ecosystem as the model, scale as a network and so can learn and adapt faster and with less risk. For to change the machine is to break it!
It's not just business but everything. We have made efficiency the key. So our schools get bigger and do worse. Government gets bigger and does less. Our striving for efficiency makes us more vulnerable. We rely on vulnerable food and energy systems in particular. Your community has no more than 3 days of food on hand. What if you lost power for 2 weeks? Think it can't happen?
As Hurricane Irene arrives on the East Coast, our entire approach to life will be tested. Machine models of high efficiency can fail when only a small part is taken down. We lost power here this week for 12 hours. Once again, we realized that every part of our lives depends on the system working. Everything came to a stop.
Time to question the model.
In 1905, when Ford perfected his model, he created a a system that was applied to all parts of life. Is that our problem deep down> Is it time to look to the better alternative?
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