Steve Jobs, Blackberry and the Importance of Planning for Disasters

I have written recently about how the best way to add jobs is to follow the example of Steve Jobs. His vision and innovation clearly created thousands of jobs (albeit many in China too) to create, design and produce Apple products along with all of the secondary suppliers who make accessories and gadgets tied to Apple products. With his recent passing, we will all lose the leadership he provided to us.

In the graphics arts industry in which we operate, Apple products literally provide the blank slate from which our ideas evolve. This has been the case since we purchased our first Apple SE computer in 1988. It had 2 MGs of RAM, all we would ever need.

I also wrote recently about the downward spiral that Research In Motion (RIM), makers of Blackberry phones , have found themselves in based on the rocket-like growth of iPhone and Android phones which now dominate the landscape. There are still millions of Blackberry phones being used in business because they used to be the “go-to” phone for virtually every major (and small) business because they were reliable, had a great email system and tied in nicely to the companies IT system. Until yesterday, RIM was just having a bad year and they continue to lose market share to the “do-it-all” iPhone and Android smart phones. Now that RIM has suffered their second catastrophic network meltdown in two years, this will be the final blow that we will not recover from. They are on the mat, face down, bloodied, and gasping for air. If they do go down or are purchased by another company, clearly this will be one of the fastest demises of what had become the “Kleenex” of the smart phone business that we have every seen. Business courses at Harvard will use this as a case study of how to lose market share and not even see it coming. We saw Palm go through this same thing although on a much smaller scale when they went from the iconic Palm Pilot in the 90s to the Treo smart phone to being purchased by HP and now essentially dead. Nice to know you Blackberry. Now when we tell a business client :just call me on my Blackberry, we may actually receiving that call on our iPhone.

Do you have an event similar to RIMs network being down that could send your company reeling? We’ve all heard about disaster preparation but just as we know we should prepare for these events, it is only too human to think “it will never happen to us.” Nevertheless, it is best to prepare. We all learned this lesson the hard way when our computers died and we had the shock of remembering that the last time we backed up was 2004.

As the old saying goes, plan for the best. . .but prepare for the worst.