2026-05-01 17:03:00
The creators of the Blackberry were sure that customers loved the keyboard. That’s what they heard all day from their users, and it must have been right since they had a huge share of the mobile phone market.
When the iPhone came out, it wasn’t seen as a threat because it had no keyboard. Blackberry was in the keyboard business, the iPhone sold something else.
We make this mistake more often than we imagine, and it’s worth looking at.
RIM, the makers of the Blackberry, didn’t actually sell keyboards. They sold the network. It’s easy to see this if you realize that a single Blackberry (with no one to connect to) was worthless, but an iPhone with millions of users and no keyboard is priceless.
Within three years, RIM went from dominating the market and reaping huge profits to essentially zero market share.
Instead of defending the keyboard, they could have defended the network.
They thought they made little boxes with batteries, but they actually made a network and gave their IT customers a story.
The heart of their customer base was business people, using business funds to pay for a business device. They wanted connection, success, and security. Freedom from fear dances with affiliation and status all day.
RIM could have offered IT departments exactly what they wanted–the chance to tell their bosses that they had control. Deniability. Security. The ability to monitor traffic and retain (or delete) information.
By defending the network, they would have made it difficult for any of these users to eagerly switch to a different network, one that their peers weren’t on.
Instead of selling devices, RIM could have sold seats. At $45 a month (bring your own device), it would have been a bargain.
The hardware process was a sunk cost, a warehouse full of liability that felt like an asset.
We get hooked on our past wins (and our fears of past losses) instead of understanding the value we’re able to provide.
A Blackberry iPhone app would compete with their own devices in a way where RIM couldn’t lose. Feed the network first. Give people what they actually wanted (connection and status) not what said they wanted (a faster way to type).
2026-04-30 17:03:00
Multi-tasking is mostly an illusion.
What we’re actually doing is slicing our focus, jumping from one thing to another and then back again.
All that jumping decreases our productivity and worse, erodes our peace of mind.
You’re only doing one thing at a time anyway. Might as well embrace that instead of spending so much time shifting gears.
2026-04-29 16:29:00
I bought a snack food the other day, and was disappointed to discover that the thing inside the container had little in common with the picture on the front. It was pallid, lifeless and drab.
The marketer who decided to improve the picture was making a choice, one with consequences. When you choose to disappoint a customer later so you can make a sale right now, you’ve also chosen to create disappointment for a living.
If you’re not proud of it, don’t serve it. Improving the image on the package shouldn’t be a substitute for making something people want to buy.
2026-04-28 17:03:00
When there is motion, it creates an impact of the environment.
First, the path is barely noticeable. But then, others see the hint of a path and walk on it, making it more clear. Finally, the path becomes the route.
Sometimes there’s a small rut. But a rut shifts gravity and wheels or feet land in the rut, making it deeper. This is how moguls appear on ski hills as well.
When it rains, the paths and ruts fill with water, and we call them puddles.
Of course, puddles are a metaphor.
Puddles only exist when there’s been some sort of motion that caused a depression that could collect the water. If you want to see how the audience is responding, how the culture is shifting, how your customers are acting–look for the puddles.
Fill in the rut and a new one will appear somewhere else. There are almost always puddles.
2026-04-27 17:03:00
In terms of cost, serving a small ramekin of toasted pistachio nuts is a tiny portion of what an airline spends in transporting someone first class.
In fact, it’s such a relatively small expense that it’s easy to simply avoid it. Send the money to the bottom line and focus on the parts that are actually worth paying for.
Gratuitous bonuses send signals.
They tell the customer that you have the resources and confidence to pay attention to the little things.
They help distinguish extraordinary items from ordinary ones (after all, the folks in coach show up at the arrivals gate at exactly the same time).
And they deliver a story of status, one that’s internalized and often shared.
I’ve never seen a product or service that couldn’t be improved with metaphorical warm pistachios.
Pass the nuts.
2026-04-26 17:03:00
The expression “bad money crowds out the good” refers to Gresham’s Law. It means that once lesser-quality and counterfeit currency begins to be traded, people hoard the good stuff and only trade the poor substitutes.
Social media platforms fall into a trap like this when they seek to grow. For example, at the beginning, Substack had a very high signal to noise ratio–plenty of good ideas and so readers were happy to expect that an email from them or recommendation from the platform was worthwhile. It didn’t get put in the spam or promo folder, because it wasn’t spam.
But now, having run out of the highest-quality content, the site is making it easy for hustlers to import vast lists of email addresses and quickly grow (or appear to grow) their lists. I’m getting unsolicited and unwanted”subscriptions” often, and the easiest thing to do is just send all of their messages to spam. Which hurts the original good currency. Once the bad “money” shows up, it attracts more bad money.
The same thing happens when trusted sources start padding their content with AI slop, or when a small business inserts a few low-value, high-margin items into their sampler pack.
Attention is precious. Trust is even more so.
When you trade them both for growth, it’s inevitable that you’ll fade away.
