rise and fall

first movers

"Pioneers get slaughtered; settlers prosper."

"Five years ago BlackBerry had 53% of the SmartPhone market; today their market share  is 2%."
- CNN

Image source here.

groups of seeds

Click to enlarge.

grand illusion

"For Balsillie, business is 5 per cent strategy, 95 per cent execution, so RIM focuses on execution in the full knowledge that most competitors cannot maintain a similar concentration. 'You never modulate, you just don't stop, you never give advantages, and you count on the other person blinking. They'll have to reorg, or they'll quit, or they'll be overaggresive, or they'll do something erratic. Methodical predictability with a high function, high trust, high execution-centric organization is an unbelievably effective strategy,' said Balsillie, who takes his work seriously but not himself. 'Do your best, live for the day, go to bed, and do it again tomorrow. Don't live with regrets, don't over-scenarioize and don't worry about the future. That's all there is. The rest of it is just a grand illusion.'"
- Rod McQueen, BlackBerry: The Inside Story of Research In Motion, pg.305

"email on a belt"

According to Fortune, Research In Motion is the fastest growing company in the world.

geometric

Due to Moore's Law, where capacity doubles every eighteen months, within fifteen-years everything that's on the Internet now can and will be stored on one's own personal Smartphone.

RIM is Fortune's fastest growing company

Research in Motion (RIMM)
Headquarters: Waterloo, Canada
Market Cap: $41.3 billion

3-Year EPS Annual Growth Rate: 84%
3-Year Revenue Annual Growth Rate: 77%
3-Year Total Return Annual Rate: 45%

Price/Earnings: 20.4

Full story at Fortune.

An earlier reference to RIM here.

on not being a victim

"Things happen. People get hit by cars. People can have health issues. You can have unfortunate things happen. I think the most important thing is to do the pragmatic thing and move on."

- RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie [born 1961] on a recent $600 million intellectual property settlement.

An earlier reference to Balsillie here.

in the moment

"You can double real quick and halve real quick."

- RIM cofounder Jim Balsillie [born 1961] on simplification and humility. Initial investors realized a 30,000% return.

Apple And RIM Take Majority Of Cell Phone Industry Profits

TechCrunch reporting here.

Blackberry Bullet

Created by a New York ad agency to win RIM's business. The Record explains here.

Reputation Index

RIM ranks 2625 out of 5787 in a Vanno algorithm monitoring companies in the press. 

An earlier reference to RIM here.

Axiom

Image source Digital World Tokyo.

"All the advances in computing made so far revolve around the digital bit, a tiny electrical pulse that can either be recorded as a one or a zero—a system we know as binary. According to Moore's Law, every two years we'll figure out a way to double the number of transistors on a computer chip. This explains the shrinking nature of your BlackBerry and the fact that Apple now makes a laptop that slides into a manila envelope. The problem is, if Moore's Law is followed to its natural conclusion, in as little as 10 years, those bits we pack into our iPods will be the size of atoms. This is where quantum computing takes over.

Quantum computers employ quantum bits, or qubits, that behave in very strange ways. For starters, unlike bits, they don't have to be recorded as either a one or a zero—they can be both at the same time. So with only 40 or 50 qubits (we're talking the size of molecules), a quantum computer may one day perform the same tasks the world's most powerful machines now perform with hundreds of megabytes. If you could just jam that kind of power into your BlackBerry...who knows what it could do?"

- David Fielding, Report on Business

And the Oscar goes to ...

Before co-founding RIM in 1984, Mike Lazaridis [born 1961] built hand buzzers for the teen quiz show Reach for the Top. In 1994, he won an Emmy for technical work in television, and in 1999 an Academy Award for developing an innovative film-reader. A profile of the Waterloo University drop-out here. Another profile of Lazaridis with his co-founder Jim Balsille [born 1961] here.

Some including Canaccord Capital now caution shareholders to unload their RIM positions because RIM's latest touch screen Storm product underwhelms in the fickle, fashionable, risky consumer electronics space.

An earlier reference to RIM here.

feel good item at feel bad time

"People like to reward themselves even in down times."

- Rick Turoczy, High Tech Industry Analyst on why sales of Smartphones haven't yet been impacted negatively by the economic downturn.

Another reference to RIM here.