TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Boy Genius Report has a an inside look at RIM, and it’s not pretty:

The three-year roadmap for RIM products focused on refining the technology in phones had already been released, rather than looking at where to add major new componentry or trying to identify or even shape future trends. “One of the main reasons RIM missed the mark with the browser was because
they were always proud of how little data usage a user would use,” a former executive said. “There was no three-year plan at RIM.” RIM would be proud of the fact that someone would only use 1MB of data in a month in 2005, and as a result, there wasn’t ever any extensive R&D done within the browser space.

One day soon, and probably sooner than we expect, there’s going to be a case study written about RIM’s collapse, and this will be one of the main reasons cited for their failure. RIM ignored technological and societal trends and focused on iterating their devices.

They moved their horse-and-carriage toward perfection while their competitors built the automobile.