Musings by Rod McQueen Blog

Hats off to Larry

Now that Industry Minister Tony Clement has said no to the sale of Potash Corp. and BHP Billiton has withdrawn its offer, nationalists like myself should feel happy, but I don’t. Rather than a hollowing-out where a head office was moved, what we have here is a hollow victory. It feels like your team won because the other side scored in its own net during the dying seconds of the game. Don’t get me wrong, this is the right outcome, but the wrong way to get there. Canada has the most open policy in the developed world when it comes...

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Looking for Mr. Wright

The lateral arabesque by Jim Prentice from government to business augurs well for both worlds. The former minister of the environment will be able to guide CIBC in the ways of government and public policy without having to lobby or get anyone’s knickers in a knot over conflicts of interest, perceived or otherwise. Prentice joins a short, but distinguished, list of senior officials and politicians who have recently made a similar leap to the private sector. Others include Frank McKenna, Kevin Lynch and David Dodge. Fewer are the wandbearers who leave business for public service. Bank of Canada Governor Mark...

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Same old song

Don’t they read their own paper at The Globe and Mail? Hard on the heels of the speculative October 13 story on a possible acquisition of Research In Motion, columnist Barrie McKenna revisits the same topic again this morning. I wish I could tell you he had something new to say although he did try to clothe the old idea in the context of the takeover offer for Potash Corp. McKenna writes about how RIM is widely held, has a global brand, and makes a case for Ottawa to protect the Waterloo-based company. Yada, yada, yada. After declaring that Ottawa...

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Playing with PlayBook

Last month, when Research In Motion unveiled PlayBook at the BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco, there was no demo. The co-CEOs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, had done this sort of tapdance before. In the pre-BlackBerry days, when the then current model was called Bullfrog because it was so big, RIM came up with Leapfrog. It was much smaller, about the size of a deck of cards. In 1997 Mike and Jim flew to Atlanta to show Leapfrog to executives at BellSouth. But all they had were two wooden models, each with a plastic screen and a pasted-on paper...

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Eat my dust

Has Steve Jobs totally lost it? The cool guy in the black turtleneck who knows better than most how to market hardware seems to have gone a bit bonkers. On the release of excellent numbers today which showed Apple’s profit up 70 per cent on iPhone sales of 14.1 million in the quarter (compared with 12.1 million BlackBerrys) Apple’s CEO decided it wasn’t enough just to crow, he had to castigate. But first, the condescending warm-up lecture. “They must move beyond their area of strength and comfort into the unfamiliar territory of trying to become a software platform company,” said...

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Meeting our Waterloo

Everything you watch on TV these days seems to be sponsored by BlackBerry. Whether it’s Major League Baseball or Glee, Torch and BlackBerry Messenger are well and widely touted. The run-up to Christmas is, of course, a major time for retail sales, BlackBerry included, so promotional activity peaks. All this activity is just as well. BlackBerry is losing its ranking as top dog in North American smartphone sales. Although BlackBerry remains number one in sales by an individual brand, recent market share figures show it has been eclipsed by Android when you take into account all of Android’s iterations. To...

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An avid reader writes

I like the redesigned Globe and Mail. Somewhere there’s a black-and-white photo of me, aged about six, crouched on the kitchen floor reading the Globe, spread out before me, so I’ve seen a few designs come and go. This was not one of the usual rejigs, where sans serif type was switched to serif and a few column rules were dropped in where they didn’t exist before. No, this was the biggest upheaval I can recall. Even so, there were those who dismissed last Friday’s launch as being derivative of The Guardian. All those naysayers were blown out of their...

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Halfway home

Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie this week announced they will both be donating some Research In Motion shares to their respective foundations and selling additional shares. For Balsillie, about 800,000 shares are involved with half going to a charitable foundation. At $50 a share, that’s about $40 million. The gift by Lazaridis is larger. He will be divesting 1,050,000 shares. Of that, 350,000 shares will go to the foundation with the remaining 700,000 shares sold over an 18-month period plus additional shares until the value reaches $200 million. Some of the shares to be divested by the co-CEOs come from...

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PlayBook pre-launch

The release date is later than expected, the name is different, the location was a surprise … but no one admits to being caught off guard by the announcement yesterday about the new BlackBerry PlayBook. That’s what passes for reportage these days, I guess. To me, it’s interesting that Research In Motion is going after the Apple iPad from its core strength, the enterprise customer. Consumers will buy it, too, but I can see CIOs approving this device for corporate use because the back end administration will be secure, just like the BlackBerry. For office use, the two cameras will...

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RIM not RIP

Financial results announced yesterday show a healthy disregard for all the ghoulish speculation about Research In Motion. Revenue during the last three months was up 31 per cent while earnings per share rose 76 per cent. There are now more than 50 million BlackBerry users, up 56 per cent year-over-year. And all this during an economic downturn that has confounded many companies. To be sure, BlackBerry has lost some market share. In the increasingly competitive U.S. BlackBerry was down two points, but so was Apple. Droid, in third place, jumped five points. For investors, it’s been a good week. Share...

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Overheard and overstated

A lot has happened in the world of Research In Motion since my book was published six months ago. Share price is down 38 per cent and some analysts, particularly in the U.S., have gone sour on the stock. The BlackBerry Torch seems to be selling well, but the iPhone 4 may be selling better. Several governments, including India, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, have been holding RIM hostage trying to gain access to encrypted email messages for security purposes. All of this reminds me of the bitter patent battle in 2005-2006 when it appeared RIM was finished...

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Blessed are the geeks

Just back from a week’s holiday in Nova Scotia. Ate lobster daily, unlike the Globe and Mail’s Ian Brown who spent the summer writing about food across Canada, came to Nova Scotia, and declared he would eat no lobster. We managed to miss not only Hurricane Earl but also the blessing of the BlackBerrys by Rev. Lisa Vaughan of St. Timothy’s Anglican Church in Hatchet Lake. “I think they traditionally used to call it Plough Monday, where people used to bring their farming equipment and tools to the church to be blessed,” she told the Halifax Chronicle-Herald. “Most of us...

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The luck of the Irish

Cantech Letter has done a fun item called “7 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the BlackBerry.” My favorite is: “In the third quarter of 2009 RIM added 4.4 million subscribers, a number equal to the population of Ireland.” Here’s the link.

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Two wrongs make a right

Economists have it easy. When they make a prediction about some exotic marker like GDP growth or inflation, they can keep revising their numbers as time passes so they look good in the end. The same is not the case when it comes to talking about technology. Take my post on May 17, BlackPad Bunkum, where I went to some lengths to say that Research In Motion couldn’t possibly have a competitor to iPad on the way because co-CEO Mike Lazaridis had said he’d never do it. The size of the current BlackBerry was just fine with him. Moreover, touchscreen...

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The reviews are coming in

And they are generally positive for the new BlackBerry Torch. Walter S. Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal says it’s “a big improvement … closer to its newer rivals.” As for the speculation that the future of Research In Motion is behind it, he says “RIM is hardly dead or dying.” His main complaint is that there are too few apps. For Dushan Batrovic of Dundee Capital Markets the apps are not important. “We have downloaded a total of 10-15 apps on our iPhone and rarely use any of them. Perhaps there are some perfect apps out there but we...

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