RE:2010 John Chen Interview And that was the general concept in the 2000 timeframe. Everybody's making zillions of dollars and the stocks are 300 bucks in some of the companies. Most of them don't exist anymore, but...we were not doing anything. I mean our market kept low, basically with nobody following us. It was a very, very dead company at the time. So one thing we decided was...we need to be somebody that is interesting and worth following. That means that you have to do something that other people haven't done yet that will be meaningful over time.
But you can't ask the customer, because there are two problems. If you ask the customer, well, they don't know what they need to know. They're expecting people like us to be a kind of advisor. And secondly, if they articulated what they needed, I'm already too late. Because, most likely, if they asked my competitors, my competitors would go in and say: "I'll you what, you ought to do this, this, and that." And then by the time [my customers] tell me, I'm too late. I'm going to play a catch-up game forever.
Blackberry says John Chen is the CEO of the decade