BlackBerry

Title: BlackBerry – The Inside Story of Research in Motion

Author: Rod McQueen

Publisher: Hachette India, 2010 (First)

ISBN: 978-1-55263-940-5

Pages: 320

Mobile communication is a fast paced world of consumer technology where ideas lose sheen overnight and new gadgets take their place. This book tells the story of the company that built the wonder device of the first decade of the 21^st century. It follows the flowering of an idea in the mind of a college dropout and narrates the story of how the company grew into a giant, with half of the market share and 12,000 employees. Curiously, the book was written at the pinnacle of BlackBerry’s growth, in 2009. It suffered continuous reversals of fortune in the next five years, ending in losses. The timing of the book is thus superb, otherwise it might never have been written. Probably this demonstrates the author’s exemplary journalistic sense of making the right note at the right time. Rod McQueen is a business writer and has edited several books.

Mike Lazaridis was the person who thought about a research oriented company and founded one after dropping out of college while pursuing his engineering career. His excellent skills on microprocessors helped the fledgling company to secure good contracts. The company was founded in 1984 and it took 8 years before the co-CEO Jim Balsillie joined. The 1980s threw out a host of opportunities for the microcomputing platform. Ever since Intel came out with a microprocessor in mid 1970s, the field which would revolutionize computing beyond all recognition was born. Lazaridis proved himself in wireless data communication, by designing products for coordinating truck movement through the just introduced Mobitex technology pioneered by Ericsson. As is usually seen, good technicians perform miserably in dealing with finance which prompted him to hire a suitable guy in order to get money, so that he can spend it. Jim Balsillie came in in 1992. The company’s name was hit upon quite accidently. Lazaridis wanted to have the defining word ‘motion’ in its name to imply wireless connectivity on the go, but all combinations he tried at first were already taken. Then he came across the phrase ‘Poetry in Motion’ in a quite unrelated setting and the young founder didn’t hesitate much to use ‘Research in Motion’ or RIM for short.

Two way pager or a portable device that could handle email was the first product of RIM that captured a customer base to the company. But it was the Blackberry, which debuted as a PDA with email facility that lifted its fortunes. Introduced in 1999, Blackberry was a milestone in mobile communications. Voice was added to it only three years later in 2002, but its rock solid data performance was staggering. It was the only communication platform that worked stably and reliably in the aftermath of 9/11, when other devices succumbed to the infrastructural overload. Perhaps this aspect of stability commented itself to the US government to adopt BlackBerry in a big way. This came in handy for RIM in ensuring government support to it to withhold an injunction by a court in a patent infringement lawsuit filed by a little known company more as a means to extort money than for any real violation of its intellectual property rights. BlackBerry grew from strength to strength to grab a market share of 51% in North America. There the story as told by the book ends.

Unfortunately for RIM, the next five years till now proved rocky and most troublesome in its career. Google’s android-based smart phones stole a march on BlackBerry to usurp market share. RIM suffered losses, changed its name to BlackBerry Ltd, but its prospects are still bleak as I write this in August 2014. The book is graced with a forward by the Co-CEOs Lazaridis and Balsillie, which opened a path for the readers to reach the visionaries’ hearts. The distinguishing work that separated these young visionaries from other businessmen of equal rank is their benevolent attitude to academia. RIM always treated students from University of Waterloo, Canada, which was also its neighbour, with utmost respect to their budding ideas. Lazaridis himself was a student there and recruited many of its talented personnel. At one time, RIM’s company sign on its head office was directed at the university, rather than showing it off to the world. The founder’s thrust to the spread of knowledge and support to research with no corporate strings attached, found expression in the setting up of the Perimeter Institute in 2000 with a 100 mn C$ donation from Lazaridis and Centre for International Governance and Innovation (CIGI) with 70 mn C$ from Balsillie.

The book is endowed with a simple yet elegant style, but fails to impress as it never rises above the level of a corporate promotional leaflet. All pages are filled with laudatory comments, either from the author, or from the CEOs’ present and former colleagues. The book itself seems to have been a sponsored product of RIM, judging from its content and tone. This brings down its credibility and integrity. What the book sorely lacks is a set of photographic plates of the company’s early offices and early products like Inter@ctive Pager 950 and MobiTalk, which would have provided a measure of comparison to gauge its achievements.   

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star