Why RIM failed the Blackberry Storm
During his keynote on consumer products failures, New York Times columnist David Pogue shared his personal RIM nightmare story with the audience here at FailCon.
For Pogue, RIM decided to ship the incomplete Blackberry Storm in the Fall of 2008 because it was under pressure to deliver it to Verizon for the start of the holiday season.
“It [Blackberry Storm] was horrible. It was a piece of crap. It was so filled with bugs, I will be on the phone every day with RIM… It just doesn’t work,” explains Pogue.
But what made this a complete disaster for RIM is it continuously denied that the Blackberry Storm had any problems, despite tons of consumer complaints on the Web and a devastating email Pogue received from one of the Storm team member:
“When you wrote that this product was released prematurely, you were absolutely right, and everybody here knew it… Internally, many of us argued that we would be hurting ourselves by rushing it out the door. Obviously, our managers disagreed,” reads the email.
Jean-Baptiste Su is the technology columnist for L’Expansion, the leading business publication in France. He’s also the co-founder and editor of TechPulse 360, a blog at the crossroads of business and technology, exploring the innovation and companies defining the high-tech and clean-tech industries.
Jean-Baptiste started his journalistic career 18 years ago at IDG in France, first as reporter at InfoPC (PC World) and then senior editor at Le Monde Informatique (ComputerWorld). He later joined Decision Informatique, part of Groupe Tests (01 Informatique, 01net.com…) as senior editor, before heading to France’s financial daily newspaper La Tribune as its local Silicon Valley correspondent.
