u/BaldwinLaFontaine

Is IBM successful was going to be my original title. The company exists but you can’t buy any consumer electronics from IBM now.

PC jr hasn’t made it since the early 1990s

1. ThinkPads - you have to buy those from Lenovo.
2. ThinkServers - sold off to Lenovo
3. OS2 Warp - discontinued
4. Phones - never made one
5. Anything else - nothing the consumer buys.

But chances are you use something from IBM everyday. Interac the Interac’s Token Service Provider was built and runs on IBM technology. You use it everyday but have no idea.

IBM realized something: to stay in consumer technology is to commit yourself to a fickle market.

1. You need charismatic executives who can sell a vision, not merely engineers who can build a good product.
2. You need a constant stream of “the next big thing,” because last year’s innovation rapidly becomes ordinary.
3. As products commoditize, margins get squeezed and scale becomes everything. If you want higher margins you need the latest and greatest.

Stay in that game long enough and there’s a danger that innovation stops solving problems and starts becoming innovation for innovation’s sake.

Eventually your marketing chief is standing on stage yelling “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass” while unveiling a $3,000 trash can.

IBM looked at that treadmill and basically said: we’d rather sell the infrastructure underneath everything.

Consumers buy technology because it delights them. Governments and businesses buy technology because it cannot let them down.

So how does this relate to Canada

That’s where our tech industry lives. That’s where our technology industry competes.

Canadian tech often seems less interested in being the thing you notice and more interested in being the thing underneath that absolutely has to work. You don’t notice it—and if you do, it probably means something has gone wrong.

You probably haven’t used a BlackBerry phone since 2011. But you probably still use a BlackBerry product every single day.

Start your car, board public transit, turn on a light switch, you’re using BlackBerry. The critical equipment that keeps things running is QNX which what ran on the BlackBerry 10 phones.

Governments, businesses etc use it because they need something that can’t fail.

QNX is engineered so failures are isolated and the critical system can keep operating. Its microkernel architecture runs most OS services outside the kernel, so one component failing doesn’t necessarily take everything else down with it. Its safety-certified versions are used for automotive, industrial, medical, nuclear control systems, and other mission- or life-critical applications.

Competitors can’t just move into that space. It’s enduring capital. Apple can come out tomorrow and say hey look we can change your nuclear reactor control system with our software and hardware that has a touch screen and there response would be that’s cool but we can’t have this go down and QNX has proven to be reliable.

Innovation in this space is different. You need to constantly become more reliable. Not more flashy.

There are others. State Bars in the US are increasingly pushing Clio as practice management software Clio sells isn’t really “cool software.” It sells lawyers confidence that their practice won’t fall apart. It uses automatic backups, geographically redundant infrastructure, encryption, disaster-recovery testing and a recovery system for many deleted records.

OpenText Enterprise information management: documents, cybersecurity, business networks, IT management, compliance.

Constellation Software — Toronto. It buys and operates vertical-market software: boring, mission-critical applications for particular industries.

Celestica designs and manufactures data-centre, AI/cloud, aerospace, defence, healthcare and industrial systems for other companies

I could go on and on.

There is a downside. It’s boring and it makes less money in the short run. But in the long rung. The customers are sticky. They aren’t going anywhere and you can build a successful long term business.

Apple is successful but it’s also a warning

I mentioned you probably don’t use your BlackBerry anymore. Why because Apple iPhone smoked it out of the water.

But did you know Apple was also days away from bankruptcy only a decade earlier. In 1997, when Steve Jobs returned, Apple was only 90 days way from filling for bankruptcy.

Why their innovation failed. Newton was garbage. PCs and windows had caught up to the Mac. The MacOS needed a full redesign and the company was bleeding cash trying to do the next best thing. Plus other organizational problems.

Apple had to bend the knee put Internet Explorer as the default browser on their computer, sign a patent deal with Microsoft and take a massive cash infusion from Microsoft.

Luckily for them they got their charismatic CEO back who sold us new innovative products like the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Now that he’s gone. You’re seeing some of the same problems creep up again. How different is your iPhone from the one released in 2007: it has FaceTime, Siri, an AppStore and iMessage. Ok those were all released with Steve Jobs. The only thing under Cook was FaceID but Microsoft beat it to the market with Windows Hello.

You can see the old problem creeping back in. Apple spent years building the Vision Pro—an extraordinary piece of engineering—and almost nobody wanted to buy it. That’s innovation without a mass market.

Other than the Apple Silicon Mac. There hasn’t been much successful innovation from them. Hence the “can’t innovate my ass” comment.

The reality is Apple ok for now. They don’t have the organizational failures they had last time and they’ve ironically gained a foothold in enterprise cause the iPhone viewed as more secure than Android. But what happens when someone else releases the next flashy thing and everyone runs there? The iPhone could could be the next BlackBerry. Yesterdays news.

Your next phone may not be an iPhone. But your next car may still be running BlackBerry software, and you may never know it. Car companies are not gonna ditch QNX cause the competitor has a touch screen and a charismatic CEO.

Europe is like us

For the record I could rewrite the above for Europe. I no longer have a Nokia 3310 but my phone relies on Nokia every day.

Why because businesses value indestructible hardware and software. Consumers will give it up for a glass touch screen.