It’s you. Sometimes, you must stop blaming the chosen tool for not solving your problem. Sometimes, the fault is your own. It is not how good the tool may be at its theoretical best. It is how good you are with it, how well you use it to solve the problem in your path. You must also start out with the right tool for the job.
Matters of security reflect their ambient surroundings, which infect security challenges with the same tendencies and folly that rage through modern life. Not only does the sound-bite age predispose us to seeking instant answers, it conditions us to seek out the sexy at the expense of the reliable – a peddler’s paradise. Witness, for example, the popular rush to set aside proven business tools in a blind lust for promised elegance and slick functionality. Few illustrations of this tug-of-war surpass the efforts of RIM to market its business tool, the BlackBerry, as a competitor of the iPhone, a device optimized for entertainment. To the business user, it is surreal to see how BlackBerry maker’s RIM is positioning its current advertising campaigns for the Torch. Whom do they showcase? Young, hip, artistic, individual consumers eager to go turbo-networking with their peers. No room for any traditional business people relying on the device to consummate a deal, manage a crisis, or communicate a plan of action to colleague or subordinate from field to office.
What Is Wrong with BlackBerry Today
It isn't the specter of being banned in Dubai or Saudi Arabia for RIM's insufficient groveling to authoritarian pressures to make it easier for these governments to decrypt electronic messages. It isn't only iPhone envy and an inability to compete head-to-head against Apple for web surfing, music playing, trendy applications, or even more trendy stylishness. No. What threaten to plunge BlackBerry into extinction are the self-inflicted wounds of lost identity and a headlong rush to transform a stand-apart business tool into a me-too, never-quite-hip-enough toy. This represents a textbook case of how to dilute and extinguish one’s own, once-formidable brand.
Instead of remembering its core market, the business customer, RIM is courting young, personal smartphone users in its TV ad campaigns. This approach forgets that business users differ from kids. So do their needs. As a business user who managed his employer's first all-BlackBerry-equipped professional staff (none of them techies) I offer these distinctions which continue to make the BlackBerry a tool that trumps the iPhone in the business world — at least for now:
My security staff and I need e-mail, phone, a robust address book that can look up phone numbers from the enterprise server, the ability to take decent but manageably small-size photos that we can e-mail easily, and Note/Memopad capacity that most other smartphones ignore or handle poorly. Strong battery life is also a plus. Because we use the device to transact serious business, we need an adult, QWERTY keyboard that facilitates sending out timely and accurate instructions suitable for board room discussion and even legal or reputational challenge in court. We do not need to mix our business applications with social networking, recorded music, games, TV or video viewing. Nor do we need to send or receive video messages of ourselves that are data-intensive but as vapid as the average teen's texting commentary on world affairs We especially lose our taste for such functions when they begin to crowd out our business applications. Example? The newer BB Curve boasts more iTunes-like functionality and video-taking while removing the flash from its camera. Hip young individuals may applaud this. Business users just shake our heads. I have three iPods, including a Touch. They cannot rival the BlackBerry for business any more than BlackBerry can compete against them for music or video access.
A Tool, Not a Toy
Memo to RIM, stop competing for the casual, high texting, low substance dilettante if you want to retain the professional as your core customer. Apple and its acolytes can't quite reformat for the serious business user. By default they alphabetize address books by first name and, when they grudgingly adding a Notes/Memopad feature, they still bypassed a rational, businesslike ordering of entries alphabetically. Instead, Apple insists on indulging callow, adolescent developer defaults, like ordering notes only by reverse chronological sequence. Great for kids with the attention span of a flashbulb and a planning horizon that stops with Saturday night. Lousy for serious business people who use Notes to carry over 50 procedures and references that they may need to consult when responding to a threat or crisis while fielding a panic call comes in at midnight.
Final Caution: Don't rely exclusively on the techies to chart your course. All specialists sooner or later fall in love with the tools of their trade. The same technologists who push for more and more functionality are the ones who resist design freezes and struggle to come up with final documentation – or final anything. It's always more fun to keep trying something new (the Edsel, New Coke, and Microsoft Vista) than to finish and perfect what they have grown bored with. But the business user needs and desires core functionality that works reliably – not razzle dazzle and the future promise of cool things that take too long to work and offer little practical value in relation to the effort necessary to master and troubleshoot.
For RIM and the serious business user, decide. What business are you in, tool or toy? Who is your customer, the business professional or the budding or overripe adolescent? Their wants and needs are very different, and one may be less forgiving or fault tolerant than the other.
- Nick Catrantzos
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Nick Catrantzos + Tom Goff
- All Secure
- NICK CATRANTZOS is the lead author of the All Secure website and is the emeritus security director for a large public organization. He has also managed security aspects of corporate takeovers, response to international hostage situations, and finding and keeping secrets. He has been board certified in security management, licensed as a private investigator, and certified as an incident commander. He worked as a case officer for a discreet branch of public service. He protected stealth technology at Lockheed and, later, as a consulting security director for both Kroll and Control Risks, he assisted executives with workplace violence cases and with protecting VIPs and critical assets globally in volatile areas. Nick's partner, TOM GOFF, was a captain in the Military Police Corps, U.S. Army Reserve and has a law degree from the University of California at Davis. He is a former reporter for Fortune Magazine, was senior editor at New York Magazine and Esquire, and has provided crisis and communications counsel to senior executives at Fortune 500 companies, including Lockheed, ARCO, Microsoft, Nissan, and Sony Pictures.