Terminal Musings

It has been a bad year for RIM. Its market share has tumbled; its growth rate lags those of their major competitors; and its latest products have been panned by both reviewers and the market. All this is compounded by the sense that the company is simply playing catch-up while competitors like Google and Apple release feature after feature and encroach on RIM’s once-impregnable enterprise turf.

RIM’s current predicament has been a long time coming and is the result of years of questionable decisions and deeply ingrained attitudes. The company is in the fight of its life, and its only hope of survival lies not in a killer product or two, but solving its core issues and laying the groundwork for a string of successful hits. So what are these core issues? Simply put: lack of vision, focus and polish, being too tied to the past, and not innovating aggressively enough. [Continued]

Doug Ford’s musings on the future of Toronto’s lakeshore symbolize all that is wrong with the city. His desire to end City Hall’s involvement in Waterfront Toronto, to turn the land over to private developers and eschew a coherent vision over the future of the waterfront, and to build an outsize stadium on the greatest material asset Toronto owns, speak to the total lack of vision that permeates all discussion in the city. It is this lack of vision that holds Toronto back. It is what killed Transit City, what killed the hockey rink in the Lower Donlands, and what prevents Downsview Park from being an urban park on the size and scale to the greatest in the world. So focused on the day-to-day, this city no longer dreams; it no longer believes it has a future where it could be more than the bland, sprawled-out expanse that characterizes so much of it. It is why people jam the streets to leave every weekend, why every political discussion always revolves around money, and why there is deafening silence when the Fords’ short-sighted thinking makes the airwaves. It is why Toronto is not world-class.