What Happened to the Crack-berry?

This amazing letter was written to RIM leadership by a ranking exec about the woes of their flagship product line, which you know and love as BlackBerry. 

It’s not often that a company* can appropriate a 1000-year-old word and completely change its meaning in the culture.  It’s a testament to the way RIM changed–one could say created–the smartphone category with its product.  You always remember your first: mine was in 2003: the 6200, the last greenscreen model, which I promptly traded for the 7200 (color!) a year later.  RIM’s woes since then have been well documented and are fascinating.  They go something like this: guessed wrong, got lazy, became out of touch with the market it created.

It’s the last point I find most interesting.  RIM defined the smartphone market by convincing businesspeople that responding to emails while on the toilet at 11pm was completely acceptable behavior.  But they swiftly lost touch with this category by missing the implication of what they had created: that email and phone use were precursors to the real game, which was putting a computer in everyone’s pocket.  That was where the category was always headed— it’s easy to see now.  But at the time, just the addition of a phone was so radical that when Blackberry first added it to its handheld–which was an overgrown two-way pager, they didn’t even include a numbered keyboard.

Medicare Advantage is in a similar moment.  While CMS gets credit for creating the category, seniors are now comfortable with managed Medicare.  This coming generation even more so.  But will the product be left behind by ACOs or other forms of integrated care? By MSAs? By something really cool that we don’t even know about?  Will MA learn how to integrate a phone?  And will we forget to put the numbers on it?

*A CANADIAN company, at that!