Archive for July, 2010

Monday morning I’m on CBC’s national affairs show The Current in debate with blogger and investor Eric Jackson about the future of Research In Motion. Jackson describes RIM as GRIM.

As far as he’s concerned, RIM’s best days are behind it and the company hasn’t kept up with the competition. The announcement by RIM and AT&T expected in New York on Tuesday does not impress this gloomster. If the “slider” that’s expected is anything like the photos that have leaked, then the device will be a dud, he says.

Oh, BTW, Jackson is shorting the stock. I don’t much like investors who play the market that way, by betting a stock’s share price will fall and then make money all the way down.

To be sure, RIM share price has slid 20 per cent this year while Apple is up 20 per cent. I will argue on the show that RIM’s finances are sound, sales and revenue are rising, they’ve just become one of the top five smartphone sellers in the world and they continue to make the best-selling smartphone in North America by shipping twice as many units as iPhone.

I think Mr. Jackson is looking at a normal corporate cycle and declaring it to be a death spiral. He says RIM will be gone in ten years; I say they’ll still be flying high. He’s not the first to predict RIM’s demise. That was a recurrent theme that I saw while doing my four years of research on this book. There’s even a list in the book of more than a dozen “giant killers” that were supposed to finish off the BlackBerry but didn’t do the job.

Listen on Monday to your local CBC Radio One at 8:37 a.m. (9:07 in Newfoundland) and decide who’s right.

The July 26, 2010 issue of Fortune contains the cover line: The Ten Smartest People in Tech. I turned to page 82, curious to see where Research In Motion co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie ranked.

Hmm, not under Smartest CEO. That designation went to Steve Jobs of Apple. Not Smartest Founder, which was Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Those are good choices, but neither man from RIM was even named as one of the four runners-up in those categories.

In fact, Lazaridis and Balsillie did not appear anywhere on the 50-member honors list that has a winner and four runners-up in each of the ten categories. Despite Fortune’s purported interest in the global economy (the issue also features the magazine’s Global 500 ranking) the list is oddly U.S.-centric. The only obvious ringer is Canadian director James Cameron whose film Avatar brought him the Smartest Hybrid title.

Then again, for all their vaunted world view Americans can be pretty provincial, can’t they? Members of Congress, for example, vote for free trade but then erect as many protectionist hurdles as possible to frustrate companies who want to export goods to the United States. Fortune has fallen into the same narrow-minded thinking as those analysts who praise Apple’s financial results and dismiss RIM’s success despite the fact that BlackBerry remains the top-selling smartphone in North America.

Oh well, Mike and Jim can take some solace from the fact that Bill Gates didn’t make the Smartest People list, either.

Great review by Roopinder Singh in The Tribune of India. Here’s the link.

Nice piece in yesterday’s Halifax Chronicle-Herald on my new book. Here’s the link.

Just received my copy of the British edition of BlackBerry: The Inside Story of Research in Motion. Published last month by Aurum Press, it is a handsome product with a cover slightly altered from the version available in Canada and the United States. Aurum used a photo of a different model of the BlackBerry and made some of the words “pop” nicely on the front cover and the spine. On the outside back cover, they replaced the photo of the co-CEOs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, with a generic shot of a young person lying on the ground with backpack and a BlackBerry. Here’s the link to take a look and buy the book from Amazon.co.uk.

Publication in Britain was given a boost by a praising review in the Financial Times of London, which I have long regarded as the best English-language newspaper in the world. What author wouldn’t like his style referred to as “jaunty.” Here’s the link to the review.

Everything was in white for the Queen’s visit to Research In Motion yesterday: a white lab coat for the 30-minute plant tour on the aptly named Phillip Street and white gloves on Her Majesty’s hands to receive the white BlackBerry given as a gift. Even the Porter Airlines aircraft that flew Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to the local airport was white.

The Queen was welcomed by thousands of local residents, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and other politicians, as well as Mike Lazaridis, RIM co-CEO and co-founder, who invited his parents, Dorothy and Mike, to the occasion.

The Queen even got to participate in the inspection process, pressing a key on a BlackBerry as part of the final check of the device. The excitement continues today when Prime Minister Stephen Harper visits the Perimeter Institute. Among the physicists currently working at the Institute, founded by Lazaridis, is Stephen Hawking who came a long way from his usual post in Britain to be in the same city as Her Majesty.

Ken McGuffin, manager of media relations at the Rotman School of Management, emailed me today to say that he’s in Mumbai and saw my BlackBerry book on the shelves in the several bookstores he visited. “Unfortunately,” he quipped, “you’re not a hit here until the guy on the sidewalk selling the counterfeit books is selling it as well.”

I take his point. BlackBerry is about to go on sale in China. I have this nightmare that one copy is sold and then the rest are pirated. In fact, such activity is already happening right here in North America. There’s a site where you pay $29.99 for a lifetime subscription to download unlimited music, movies and books. BlackBerry: The Inside Story of Research In Motion is available; more than 12,000 people have downloaded this digital edition. This is what happened to music beginning around 2000 with Napster. As a result, CD sales are down more than 50 per cent. Books are headed for the same slippery downloading slope with authors receiving nothing for their hard work.

Tell you the name of the site? Are you kidding?