RIM Employee Begs Co-CEOs to Re-Focus on End Users

An anonymous Research in Motion employee today published a letter to the company’s senior management team begging them to change the companies direction by refocusing on end-user experience, among other things. The letter was published by The Boy Genius Report.

While it might be easy to dismiss it as the bitter rantings of a disgruntled employee, I think it’s worth reading. Not just for yet another perspective on what RIM is doing wrong, but because it presents the exact series of organization problems that enterprise 2.0/social business tools are intended to solve.

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According to the letter:

• RIM is out of touch with what its customers want
• Management has trouble communicating
• Innovation is stagnant
• People aren’t held accountable for their work
• Senior management isn’t listening to the employees

Some of the letter writer’s suggestion include making key decision makers use competitors’ products for a week at a time and, to fix the development tools problem, “Recruit serious talent, buy SDK/API specialist companies, throw a truckload of money at it.”

RIM responded to the letter, casting doubt that it really came from a high-level employee, but acknowledging that it has had difficulties recently. But remember the famous open letter from Jamie Murai on BlackBerry development. RIM was quick to respond, but the problems persist.

I’ve been hard on RIM for the past year, but I do feel sorry for Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis. They’ve built a tremendous (and profitable) company over the past 27 years, and for a time they had the best smartphone around. Now all anyone wants to do is compare RIM to Apple and Google. I’m no longer a RIM customer myself, but I do hope they pull through this.

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