Going or Already Gone
 

What will be gone in 2013? Watching American Airlines attack their employees rather than fix their obvious defective management problems puts AA on a list of companies headed for dissemenation. 30 years ago, once the best and innovative airlines. This company is so corrupt as to demand $billion give backs from company employees. And then secretly enriched management with $multi-million bonuses. That same management is again demanding the employees take more pay and benefit cuts.

The list may include Avon, salon.com, Suzuki, MetroPCS, and Talbots. Also on a list of going are RIM (Blackberry), Acme Markets, Erricson, Sony, and Nokia.

The fall of RIM is most stunning. Blackberry dominated the smart phone market. Due to insufficient innovation, RIM's demise has been spectaculor. During a three year period of insufficient innovation, sales increases from $3billion to $20billion. A benchmark for how spread sheets only report events long previous. How the spread sheets cannot report current conditions. And why the product - not profits - are the #1 objective to any company.

RIM makes me sad. They basically invented the smart phone. Popularized it anyway. I've got a Blackberry through work, and it's almost 2 years old. I looked recently at the current Blackberry lineup to see what kind of new phone I might get to replace this one, and they are basically exactly the same as they were 2 years ago.

But I just heard that my company is willing to get us iPhones now. So my next work phone might be an iPhone. (And RIM is even a major client, so that speaks volumes.)

There is a new Blackberry OS about to come out now. Probably too little too late.

A benchmark example of what Clayton Christensen so accurately defined in "Innovator's Delemma".

BTW, Microsoft almost went the exact same way because it ignored the Internet. Bill Gates reallize his mistake just in time - and saved Microsoft.

In this field, it takes all the running you can do just to keep up. Two years of stagnation in mobile phones = corporate death.

This thread is kind of like the celebrity death pool with corporations.