Two years ago, Research in Motion founder Mike Lazaridis was hosting a conference called Innovation Nation at the Perimeter Institute, which he created in Waterloo, Ont.
The think-tank where I was then working was one of the organizers of the event, and at the plenary session I happened to be sitting next to the man whose company invented the BlackBerry and, later, the smartphone.
I told him that when I first went on the road as a reporter in the 1970s, we filed with portable typewriters and telecopiers that moved hard copy at six minutes per page. The first-generation fax machines weighed about 40 pounds, and typewriters were nearly as heavy.
鈥淭oday,鈥� I said, 鈥淚 can hold this in the palm of my hand, write my column on it, and push the send button. That鈥檚 how much things have changed in one working lifetime,鈥� I said.
鈥淭hat鈥檚 a great story,鈥� he said, 鈥測ou should write it.鈥�
It turned out to be a bad day at the office for Lazaridis. As we were speaking on Sept. 15, 2011, RIM鈥檚 stock was tanking, nearly $6 in one session, on an earnings miss.
But you would never have known it from his demeanour. There were no assistants whispering urgent messages in his ear. He stayed for the entire symposium, and then hosted a dinner for the presenters.
Lazaridis never gave the slightest indication that anything had gone wrong that day. It was an amazing display of grace under pressure.
In retrospect, RIM was already in trouble, bleeding market share to the iPhone, Android and other smartphones. Its PlayBook tablet was launched without email or text messaging. And its new line of smartphones, the BlackBerry 10, seemed to be years in development.
Months later, Lazaridis and his co-chair Jim Balsillie, stepped aside and made way for Thorsten Heins. The company rebranded itself as BlackBerry and rolled out the BlackBerry 10 in January of this year.
The reviews were good but sales apparently were not. Last month, BlackBerry put itself up for sale.
On Monday, it announced a conditional sale to Fairfax Financial, a Canadian insurance group headed by investor Prem Watsa. Fairfax would take it private. The preliminary offer bid is really establishing a floor figure, of $4.7 billion US, or $9 a share.
The offer is six per cent of RIM鈥檚 2008 peak price of nearly $150 per share. It probably represents the hard value of the company鈥檚 assets, with no debt, $2.6 billion in cash, a security network worth $1 billion, $1 billion in patents and its real estate. At this point, Fairfax has no partners from the technology space, and no other investors signed up.
What鈥檚 clear is that the Fairfax offer is the only one on the table, unless and until a better one comes along. The offer was apparently cobbled together over the weekend, said one Fairfax senior executive, to 鈥済et in quickly,鈥� and keep BlackBerry 鈥渨hole and stabilizing it.鈥�
There is no shortage of expert opinion on the reasons for BlackBerry鈥檚 fall from grace.
The more important question is about BlackBerry鈥檚 future. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that 鈥渢he company said Friday it would stop selling its phones after weak demand, and few analysts ascribed any value to BlackBerry鈥檚 namesake smartphone business.鈥�
Watsa said in an interview: 鈥淲e think over time,鈥� BlackBerry 鈥渃an be successful again. We think in a private setting, this company can do well, without all the noise from the marketplace.鈥�
But if BlackBerry is planning to leave the smartphone segment, that becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There is still a hard core of Black-Berry loyalists, who love their phones for features like the keyboard. A real keyboard, not a virtual one. One you can punch.
As for Lazaridis, people shouldn鈥檛 forget how much he has changed the world, the way we communicate and the way we work.
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L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy magazine.
