Is this IBM's BlackBerry moment?
About 10 years ago I briefed Gartner on IBM's behalf on IBM's emerging social collaboration tools - at the time, they had largely been developed by employees on their own time as tools to collaborate with their own colleagues - shared bookmarks, corporate micro-blogging, employee homepages etc.
I remember Gartner telling me that we had a huge edge over Microsoft; not just because of our technology, but because of our culture - Gartner said we were 400,000 people who lived and breathed remote, mobile collaborating and contrasted us to Microsoft's campus-based organisation.
The world remains mobile, social and flexible. Yes, we are flocking to cities; but we are also working from the coffee shop and the beach, and valuing the flexibility to find a work/life/home balance when we can.
I knew that BlackBerry had lost if forever when they announced they were abandoning the consumer market in order to concentrate on what they knew best - the enterprise customer. That's possibly the daftest misunderstanding of the role of the SmartPhone in our lives it was possible to make at the time.
Two of IBM's great strengths were its flexible, boundaryless collaborative culture; and the freedom it gave us to find the most productive work in pattern for ourselves. Just as the rest of the world is embracing those ideas, it's madness for Big Blue to turn its back on them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
