[aiharkness]

About mistakes, a couple things I learned from Losing the Signal....

Lazaridis many times and significantly read users and the future wrong. He thought bandwidth would continue to be precious and become even more precious, for example. He went by what he wanted and thought was best and not what the market wanted. You can't sell the best when it's the best if the market wants something else, not that BlackBerry really tried either.

I was surprised at how much BlackBerry was at the mercy of the carriers. You have to hand it to Apple for doing what BlackBerry didn't have the guts or the skill to do when BlackBerry was on top. All the assumptions Lazaridis had made and stubbornly insisted on were proved wrong by occurrences forced by Apple and the iPhone. I was left wondering how many of the bad assumptions were Lazaridis accepting the paradigm defined by the carrier and how much originated with Lazaridis himself. Undeniably, Apple disrupted the market, and overall in a good way. BlackBerry was too little too late.