Why Blackberry Failed, And Why Traditional Medicine (And Your Medical Spa) Will Too

The Globe and Mail has an article on the fall of BlackBerry which actually has three authors and takes a deep-dive into the Canadian phone makers woes.... but there's information in there for physicians.

The overarching explanation of what happened is something that we already know: RIM (Blackberry's maker) failed to iterate/change/evleove at anywhere near the speed that the market demanded in the post-iPhone era, but the article, which includes quotes from an interview with RIM founder Mike Lazaridis really puts touches the main point with the tip of a pin. Here's the quote:

“The problem wasn’t that we stopped listening to customers,” said one former RIM insider. “We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did. Consumers would say, ‘I want a faster browser.’ We might say, ‘You might think you want a faster browser, but you don’t want to pay overage on your bill.’ ‘Well, I want a super big very responsive touchscreen.’ ‘Well, you might think you want that, but you don’t want your phone to die at 2 p.m.’ “We would say, ‘We know better, and they’ll eventually figure it out.’ ”

Hubris is the fall of many frontrunners and works on every business scale, including individual small business.

You may know better than your patients, but if you don't listen to them and execute what they want, they'll go somewhere else eventually; just ask the droves of plastic surgeons how have lost patients to the familiy practice guys who aren't constantly pushing their patients into surgical proceedures.