RIM was a super-efficient machine for selling a story to CTOs, and that story required a device for people to carry around. That market is insignificantly small in comparison to the larger market of human beings; when Apple started selling to humans, there was one thing RIM could've done: blow their entire company apart and sell the same service without the handsets, by bringing the features that CTOs wanted from the Blackberry ecosystem to the world of BYOD.

But that amount of change would have been suicidal for a lot of management, and would require changing the entire company on a relative dime. It's hardly surprising that they tried to muddle through and got crushed.