Speaking as an Ontarian with some familiarity with the Waterloo area, I strongly doubt that its rural location has anything to do with RIM’s problems.

The “Good Old Boy” syndrome described can happen anywhere. The company is described as having 50-something executives who are out of touch making decisions. You can find hundreds of tech companies like this in Toronto, New York, Seattle, and SV. Some guys build a company, are successful, hire people just like them, times change, but they don’t change with it, and refuse to hire new blood.

For a theory like this to be credible, it must explain RIM, but also explain other failures and successes. You can’t posit that Apple couldn’t have existed in Wisconsin and use that hypothetical as an example to bolster the reasoning that Apple couldn’t have existed in Wisconsin. My question is, how did Microsoft succeed in the PNW? And why is it no longer succeeding in quite the same way?

I agree that Waterloo’s talent pool is interesting by virtue of UW, but not as deep as SV. Then again, lots of SV companies make these mistakes, so I think it’s more fruitful to look at the mistakes than to try to theorize about the environment somehow creating the mistakes, as if RIM would somehow be Apple if they had only relocated a decade ago.