Comment by Shenglong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shenglong | Hacker News Reader

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To add to this, RIM also takes -forever- to make some decisions. I don't believe I'm able to disclose specifics for legal reasons, but even though RIM was a partner for years, they took months and months to respond to an offer that other mobile companies JUMPED at (for good reason). There is -definitely- something wrong at their senior level, and the majority of BlackBerry users I know are only holding on out of ignorance ("it has business features"), or because of BBM (which will soon change due to Apple's messenger). There has been zero intelligent innovation out of this company for years, and my friend at RIM makes money shorting their stock. The entire culture is out of whack, and I doubt they can restructure this by themselves.

I remember an article here a few days ago, about how Silverlake (I think it was Silverlake) did some crazy restructuring. RIM is dying. Their best hope is for an external firm to step in and overhaul things completely.

First, while I can't speak for all BB users, I have stayed loyal to this brand because I love the devices and the software. I know the flaws, I notice lack of innovation, and I don't even use BBM.

Second, shorting the stock of your own company, are there no legal issues there?

What does that question have to do with his point? I'll answer: nothing.

Common misconception -- illegal insider trading is something most ordinary employees will never even be capable of. The definition is something along the lines of "trading based on material non-public information", which is not "I think this company is going to hell in a handbasket" or even usually "I think this new product is a POS an won't sell worth a damn", but things like earnings results, major contract negotiations, criminal investigations, upcoming lawsuits, mergers and acquisitions, etc.

It _is_ possible that a company might hold its employees to a different standard, but I don't think it would be reasonable to try and bar a grunt-level RIM employee from shorting the stock of a company everyone on the planet already knows is screwed.

As a hockey fan I find what you said really interesting basically because CO-CEO Jim Balsillie took the shotgun approach instead of the slow approach in trying to acquire and move the Phoenix Coyotes so I always assumed that's how he operated at RIM. So until I read what you wrote, I would never have thought Jim and RIM would take forever to make decisions--I always thought they didn't take enough time to think things through. What's very funny is everyone was saying, if only took his time, bought the team, and then slowly petitioned for a relocation he would have gotten it--but his decision making skills cost him his chance.

Good decisions aren't a function of how much time you think about them.

There is no correlation between the time taken for a decision and the quality of the decision. None.

Right. That's why infomercials always say "here's our number, call whenever it's convenient." :)

Clearly there is such a thing as taking too long, but "no correlation" is overstating it. Impulse decisions can be bad.

You are, in fact, wrong. In the case of waiting there is a correlation between the outcome and how long you spent thinking about it (leaving, aka not waiting).

So in this case a good decision to wait would become more likely the longer it took to make.

...an external firm to step in and overhaul things completely.

And do what exactly?

It seems that Nokia is in a similar situation and they're giving up on their in-house software in favor of Microsoft's Windows 7 Phone software. So, in the future, what will the difference be between a Nokia phone and a "knock-off"? Is RIM going to face the same fate?

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