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I stole the title of this post from Horace Dediu, because there is simply no better way to summarize the recent news from RIM.

RIM, the maker of Blackberry, announced last week that they would be “refocusing” on the enterprise market. RIM started a spectacular nose-dive a little after the iPhone hit the market, which many attribute to Apple’s success, but, in my mind, had more to do with RIM’s failure. Their new plans will likely continue that downward spiral.

From Asymco:

The idea of focus has huge benefits. Focus and the art of saying no are keys to greatness. However, you only succeed if you focus on the right thing. “Enterprise” is not the right thing. It’s not a valid target. Enterprise support is a feature, not a product. I don’t mean that as opinion, but as a point of fact. Focus on a set of customers whose only characteristic is a job description is missing the whole point of focus.

RIM spent the past five years focused on what everyone else was doing and giving no attention to what they were doing internally, with each new product being touted as the iPhone or iPad killer. While they were certainly lacking focus, and I agree that the decision to “refocus” on enterprise is a poor one, I tend to agree more with John Gruber, who wrote:

RIM’s problem hasn’t been focus. It’s execution. They need to ship a truly great phone. That’s it.

Focus without the ability to execute is meaningless. I can be 100% focused on the orange sitting on my desk, but until I take action to pick it up and eat it, it’s just an orange sitting on my desk and I’m still hungry.

The iPhone’s user experience made it appeal to people across user segments, not a consumer focus. That’s how Apple has been successful in the enterprise – they made a great product. RIM won’t find success by returning their focus to the enterprise, nor do they need to focus on the consumer. They need to focus on the product and then execute well.

If RIM could have executed well on even one of their projects, maybe the Playbook, they’d still be in the game. That it took them a year to implement native e-mail (a Blackberry core feature!) on the Playbook is a glaring example of a company that doesn’t know how to get things done. That RIM thinks their problem is segment focus is evidence that they aren’t going to be building great products anytime soon.

At this point, with the changes they’ve announced, I couldn’t recommend Blackberry servers and phones to an enterprise client as I don’t have confidence in RIM being around for the next refresh cycle. The best RIM shareholders can look forward to is a buyout by a patent-hoarder.