Commentary | Jason Palmer, CPA, CITP

On Wednesday, July 4th, BlackBerry CEO, Thorsten Heins wrote an op-ed piece exclusively for the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, titled “Don’t Count BlackBerry Out.”

Mr. Heins tries to make the case that it is the media who are to be faulted for reporting fact after fact that demonstrate that RIM is a sinking ship. He says he understands the frustration of shareholders and their eagerness to see the underlying value surface. Perhaps his boldest statement in the face of reality, at least from an outsiders view, is that RIM is not a company at its’ end. He then goes on to spend the rest of his op-ed piece talking about global innovation, the nascent mobile computing market, growing Blackberry market share (in countries where the iPhone/Android have not landed in force), and how Blackberry 10 is poised to connect users not just to each other but to everyday life – such as parking meters, car computers, and ticket counters.

To him I respond that I believe the three words he is looking for to describe his new Blackberry 10 Platform and Ecosystem are: The Internet, Bluetooth, and iTunes/iCloud/Google Play – which do all of that today, now, on iPhones and Android phones.

Thomas Edison, although generally credited as the inventor of the light bulb, was not actually the first to produce an incandescent bulb. What Edison did was to make it better and is actually most noted for developing the infrastructure for modern electric power. (Fun Fact in Capitalism: The first actual electric lamp was developed by Humphrey Davy and demonstrated to the Royal Society in approximately 1806. A near mirror version of “Edison’s Light Bulb” was patented a full year earlier by Joseph Swan in 1878 in England. Even then, if you printed it in the newspaper, had enough money and lawyers, you could make it almost true that “Edison invented the Light Bulb.”)

Mr. Heins claims that: “With BlackBerry, RIM created the framework that gave people their first taste of an untethered yet completely connected life.” Unfortunately for Blackberry, just like Edison, Apple has already given people a completely untethered and connected life as well as an amazing ecosystem for content producers and developer’s to flourish in. Apple took the Smartphone and built an incredible infrastructure around it that left the actual inventor in the dust.

Mr. Heins states that the latest delay in the release of the new Blackberry 10 mobile platform is due to the additional time needed to stitch together the way certain features work together and improve the integration between applications.

RIM protests that it eschews the homogenized sameness of competing operating systems. Yet Blackberry 10 is mostly a combination of what RIM would call “Best of Breed” and what most of us would call the “Best Application Companies Available for Acquisition” group of disjointed functions which, with the exception of perhaps Apple and Symbian platforms, describes how the Android mobile platform is built. Third Party Applications add missing core functionality to Android, Apple, and Symbian.

The most damning comment made by Mr. Heins is that “RIM has hired outside advisers to help me and the other members of the executive team think about the business in new ways and to explore a range of alternatives that leverage our core strengths and build on the BlackBerry brand.”

To me, if RIM had the vision for Blackberry and its’ presently untapped underlying value as well as its’ evolutionary and perhaps even revolutionary future for the Blackberry 10 mobile platform, you would be reading this on your Blackberry device today instead of on an iPhone, iPad, or Google Android based device.

As my father used to say, “Don’t tell me, Show me.”

Today, on the 236^th birthday of America I was at the Long Island home of our 26^th President, Theodore Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay. An actor portraying TR did a reenactment of a campaign speech demonstrating that Roosevelt was truly a man for the people of America. His radical progressive ideas: minimum wage, national healthcare, equal rights and opportunities for all, corporate responsibility, campaign reform, and the preservation and management of America’s natural resources were decades ahead of their time. In addition to his Summer residence, there is a fabulous museum that chronicles the life and times of not only one of our most progressive Presidents but also of a man who was a soldier, leader, philanthropist, conservator, watchdog, and promoted the greater good for all at every opportunity. To paraphrase from Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Carol”, for Theodore Roosevelt, “Mankind was his business.”

Although successive Presidents have quoted Theodore Roosevelt and spoken of his ideals, few, if any, have been able to muster the political will or have the political capital to move America as a nation towards his primary ideal of fairness. The role of Government should be to assure a level playing field so that when opportunity arises, ALL the people have an equal chance of realizing the American dream based on ability and not privilege. TR railed against the Special Interests and corruption in Government.

Today’s media and many career politicians find it easier to criticize across the aisle and be muckrakers rather then present and work towards real solutions that benefit “ALL the people.” Instead they focus on finding fault. They focus on what is best for each of them: ratings, statistical polls, pandering to the minority special interests with big checkbooks and worst of all: putting personal gain ahead of the well being of a Great Nation.

The very last panel as you leave the museum has an excerpt from a speech entitled, “Citizenship In A Republic”, delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on April 23, 1910 with this section referred to as the “The Man in the Arena.”

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Each of us should be willing to do the same for the ideals we believe in and to get involved in the process so as to move the Nation forward for the greater good of all.

On this July 4^th, 2012 let us remember that it was the signers of the Declaration of Independence who were more than willing to put their names to a document which would most certainly result in the harshest of penalties should they not have the resolve to put their personal differences aside and follow through on each being the “Man in the Arena” for our Great Nation, The United States of America.

Happy July 4^th, 2012.

Blackberry 10 and RIM – A Platform without People

“The Man in the Arena” – excerpt – by President Theodore Roosevelt