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

Jesse Hicks has a very good look at Research In Motion, from its founding to now. Add it to Instapaper and read it, because it’s insightful as to why they are where they are now.

One part particularly caught my attention:

Meanwhile, the devices had changed slowly, incrementally, just as Lazaridis wanted. (Balsillie called it “managed evolutions.”) He and his team had already cracked the hardest engineering problems; successive phones offered refinements and improvements. This iterative process let the company respond to carrier demands for distinguishing features, even minor ones. And a slow development process gave customers a feeling of familiarity: they weren’t being bombarded with new and confusing features. The strategy was simple: keep the current users happy, and let the BlackBerry name do the rest.

The assumption which underlies this philosophy is that mobile carriers and corporate IT departments are their customer. Slow and iterative is good if they’re your customer. The resulting philosophy is that mobile phones have basically reached the right form and function, and new versions from here will be iterations that improve, but don’t fundamentally change, the mobile phone as we know it.

That is the reason why RIM failed. They thought they had a commanding position, because their brand was strong with companies and individuals, and all they had to do was sell to carriers and IT departments. But ultimately, carriers and IT departments were not their customers. The end-user was, but they were locked behind the carriers and IT departments.

This slow change and unresponsiveness to their real customers opened them up to someone who went directly to the consumer, doing an end-run around the carriers, and made a device so unique and convincing that consumers would be willing to pay a premium for it. That company was Apple.

Apple wasn’t blinded by those assumptions, so they made a mobile phone which was really a little computer, and one that was nothing more than a large touchscreen. What we should learn from RIM is not just that you have to move faster than the competition. “Moving faster” is meaningless. If you’re not moving in the right direction, you’re only moving faster toward failure. What we should learn is that your basic assumptions for your business—what your skills are, what business you’re in, and who your customer is—are the most important decisions you make, and they’re decisions you might not even be consciously making.

RIM’s led them to believe that slowly iterating and creating a lot of marginally-different models with confusing names was the best strategy. Apple’s led them to believe that mobile phones are really just a subset of personal computers, that software is what’s most important, and that they should create a mobile phone that’s simple to use—and make it as simple to buy as an iPod. And now Apple’s the most important company in the mobile industry, and RIM is a failed company.

Five years. That’s all it took. Your assumptions matter.