An employee of Blackberry published an open letter to the co-CEO's on the web [see it here]. There are lessons for all in this letter.

1) It's all about the USER Experience. The people buying your product / service are the ones you have to please. Not Wall Street, your VC's, or your own desires. At the end of the day, if no one buys it.....

2) Focus. You can't be everything to everybody. You want to be everything to your Tribe! It's too expensive to market to everyone. It's also not possible to deliver great product / services to everyone. For example, every VoIP deployment can not be custom or your support folks won't have a clue how to care for your customers.

Another example, is that if you say you are a Cloud company or a VoIP company, how do you wrap into that story the 25 other services that you offer that have nothing to do with your primary focus? Stick to the knitting. Focus on delivering a few good services to a well-defined niche (at high margin). Be an expert - the best of breed in a category. [For more on this see The Dip by Seth Godin.]

3) The marketing isn't about your technology or your service, because no one gives a crap about you or your stuff. What do they care about? Themselves. The story has to be about THEM not you. How does buying your stuff make them cool, sexy, money, productive, rich? Period.

4) Leadership is importance. Not just through the tough times but also  through the crazy growth times and even through the boring"things are going smoothly along" phase. Leadership sets the tone for everyone. Leadership sees the Vision and walks the talk.

5) Apps. It's what is driving EVERYTHING! Apps to make people productive or to let them play or to help them connect / communicate. It's apps that are driving Cloud, broadband, mobility, start-ups, everything.

It's not just Blackberry that has lessons to learn.