BlackBerry Meets the iPhone

It's early 2008. You are a senior PM at Research In Motion (RIM / BlackBerry), the undisputed king of the smartphone market.

The iPhone launched last year. Initially, your co-CEOs dismissed it as a toy—it has terrible battery life, no secure enterprise email, and most glaringly, no physical keyboard. But the iPhone is starting to gain serious traction with consumers, and worse, executives are starting to bring their personal iPhones into the office and demanding IT support them.

Verizon, your biggest carrier partner and distribution channel, is panicking. They want an "iPhone killer." They are demanding a full touchscreen device from RIM to compete with AT&T's exclusive lock on the iPhone.

But your core enterprise users—and your executive board—firmly believe the physical keyboard is your untouchable moat. Typing on a flat screen is seen as an inferior, frustrating experience.

You need to design the BlackBerry Storm to satisfy Verizon without alienating your core base.

This is a Tier 1 League Match. The decisions are binary and the consequences are terminal for the company.

The principle: Incremental half-measures fail when a paradigm shift demands a complete leap. Defending a legacy moat against a disruptive platform shift only guarantees you die with your moat intact.