Lang & O'Leary: BlackBerry Service Outage

Ironfire Capital founder Eric Jackson talks about the impact of Friday's BlackBerry service outages

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Research In Motion's Co-CEOs are Brutal at Fortune Telling

RIM says it won't make its previously lowered full-year guidance. That's not a shocker but it just shows how bad these co-CEOs are at predicting the future.

Read the full post on Forbes

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Erin Burnett's Asinine Apple Analysis

Erin Burnett has a history of making snap uninformed judgments and then inviting on guests or telling a narrative seeking to confirm her bias. She did it for years in her former business anchor role about the biggest company in the world: Apple. What will she do for "real news"?

Read the full post here on Forbes

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What I Would Ask Jim Balsillie of RIM This Morning

Here are some questions for Jim Balsillie, after last night's cut earnings for Research in Motion.

Read my post on Forbes here.

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Proof Apple's Post-PC Strategy Is Working

Apple is using its lead in with the iPad to convert Android and BlackBerry users to the iOS platform. New data suggest this shift is happening faster than anyone predicted.

Read my full Forbes post here.

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RIMM's Logic for No Longer Reporting Net Adds and ASP

From the Seeking Alpha transcript of yesterday's call:

Maynard Um – UBS

Hi, thanks. Just a clarification and then a question. I guess I understand not guiding the net adds but can you run through the rationale of not reporting the net adds afterwards because there is a big sensitivity particularly to the out years related to your service revenue, and then the question is just following up on the US and it sounds like on North America net adds will actually reaccelerate kind of given the Torch and the reinvigorations from that product, but that then implies that your international net adds will actually weaken so I'm just trying to understand the dynamics, or is something happening on the international side or is there I guess if you could just run through the dynamics there? Thank you.

Jim Balsillie

Well I think we're guiding kind of 20-ish percent growth in it, so quarter-over-quarter, so there's room in both there and you kind of take a number and roll them up to a discount and but it's also – you know, you get this variability because sometimes there's – they go out as phones, sometimes there's upgrades and they don't go with net, sometimes you get these different events and so, I mean, how much information is helpful and how much do you just put yourself in a position where it's got variability as Edel said and how much do you sort of competitively disadvantage yourself by over disclosing stuff but I mean we'll give you periodic indications of the overall subscriber base.

I mean, we'll let people know when we hit a hundred million or maybe 75 million, and you can sort of do the math. It's sort of how long that is going to take and the only question is it one quarter earlier or one quarter later really, I mean that’s how you do the stuff out how we do it and that's how we have to plan our infrastructure. It's basically number of subs and the utilization profile of those guys so we have a pretty good sense of it but, you know I mean, you can also pretty much deduce it. It's just how much granularity do you give? I mean, we – know that it is competitive and then you have a responsibility to in turbulence of business to keep people all updated on it and you know –

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Research In Motion's Moment of Truth

By Eric Jackson
RealMoney Contributor
9/16/2010 2:15 PM EDT
Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson

Research In Motion (RIMM - commentary - Trade Now) will report its latest quarterly earnings this afternoon after the close. Here's a preview.

I have been short Research In Motion since mid-June, just prior to the last earnings call. Back then, my thesis was that the company was going to have a Nokia (NOK - commentary - Trade Now)-type swoon. New models were no longer going to excite. People would increasingly be drawn to the Apple (AAPL - commentary - Trade Now) iPhone 4 and new Google (GOOG -commentary - Trade Now) Android devices. I also believed that people would increasingly become trained on typing emails on flat screens and find that they were "good enough" compared with the tactile RIMM keyboard. Finally, the enterprise -- RIMM's stronghold -- looked vulnerable to me. Most people don't want to carry multiple devices, and I believed they would increasingly push to make their touch-screen phone their work phone.

This thesis is still valid today in my view (although it has become much more popular since June).

We got validation of the thesis from RIMM's June 24 earnings call, which did not paint a rosy view of the next earnings call (which is coming today). The stock sold off from $59 to the low $40s on the outlook, despite co-CEO Jim Balsillie's tough talk and optimism that his new devices would be a "quantum leap" for the company and really excite consumers.

The stock began to perk up ahead of the August announcement of the company's newest touch-screen BlackBerry, which kept the keyboard as a slide-out: the Torch. The new phone failed to inspire the critics and - a week later - when it went on sale, there were no lines outside AT&T stores or stories on your local late-night news about its debut.

Now, we hear news that JPMorgan (JPM - commentary - Trade Now) is letting its bankers use their iPhones instead of requiring them to carry a corporate-issued BlackBerry. Comscore says that BlackBerry's smartphone market share in the U.S. slipped from April to July by 2% (although it still had 39% share, making it No. 1). Nielsen released a report saying that 57% of current BlackBerry owners want to make their next smartphone something other than the brand they are using now (vs. 29% for Android users and only 11% for iPhone users).

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[*** This post is an excerpt of the full article, available by clicking here to go to RealMoney.com. Note: subscription required. ***]

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A Hard Sell for RIM

By Eric Jackson
RealMoney Contributor
8/5/2010 2:30 PM EDT
Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson

On Tuesday, Research in Motion (RIMM -commentary - Trade Now) launched its newest BlackBerry in New York with AT&T (T -commentary - Trade Now). The device is called the Torch, and it combines the standard RIM keyboard with a larger touchscreen that slides open.

We were expecting a new version of BlackBerry, running an upgraded operating system, as well as a possible new slider-type device. With the Torch, we ended up getting both of these in one. The verdict appears to be that the product is a solid improvement for RIM, compared with the company's current operating system, and that the new device has better functionality (considering the touchscreen).

Yet, there appear to be nagging doubts in most investors' and observers' minds on whether the new device will be enough to stem the tide of Blackberry defectors to Apple (AAPL - commentary - Trade Now) andGoogle (GOOG - commentary - Trade Now). From the moment the new Torch device was announced on Tuesday, when the stock got up to $58.53, RIM's stock price has dropped more than 9%.

Some of the $3 billion or so in lost market capitalization in two days can be attributed to the uncertainty around how the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia will resolve their security issues regarding RIM. But, to be frank, I view that as a non-issue in the long-term. I fully expect RIM to find a resolution that is good both for them and for those countries -- the company would really be shooting itself in the foot if it did not.

More to the point, I believe the stock's decline is an early vote on how excited investors are by the Torch -- and that isn't good news for RIM.

Now, the stock market definitely is not all-seeing or all-knowing. Let's not forget that the market -- and crack Wall Street analysts -- completely underestimated how big the iPhone and iPad were going to be. (Remember the analyst who said - shortly after the product announcement - that Apple would be lucky to sell 1 million iPads this year? They're now selling a million a month. In my view, it's also ironic that the media snickered at the name iPad and that, at this point, it's universally accepted -- so much so that no one has said a word about RIM considering the name BlackPad for its new tablet device, which is supposed to come out later this year.)

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[*** This post is an excerpt of the full article, available by clicking here to go to RealMoney.com. Note: subscription required. ***]

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RIP Research in Motion?

I spoke about my bearish views of $RIMM this morning on CBC Radio's "The Current", including a debate with a RIMM bull. Click on the link below to listen to the interview.

http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2010/08/august-2-2010.html

There's a lot of buzz surrounding an upcoming New York press conference called by Canadian telecommunications giant Research In Motion. Could a new Blackberry be on the way? RIM officials won't say. But even if the company is about to launch a new product, some financial watchers say it may be too late - that RIM's day has already come and gone

RIP Research in Motion?

Anti-RIM

If analysts are right, tomorrow could be a big day for Canada's high-tech powerhouse, Research in Motion. There's a lot of buzz surrounding a press conference in New York many industry observers think it's been called to announce the launch of a new Blackberry. But no one really knows for sure. RIM is keeping the reasons for the conference very hush hush.

The buzz comes as the iconic telecommunications giant is weathering some tough times. In fact, some well-respected financial journalists have already written RIM's obituary, Eric Jackson is one of them. He is a senior contributor to the TheStreet.com, a leading financial analysis website, and founder and president of Ironfire Capital.

Pro-RIM

Not everyone thinks RIM is on its deathbed. Rod McQueen is the author of several best-selling books about Canadian business. His latest book is called, Blackberry: The Inside Story of Research in Motion.

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RIM's Bleak Future

By Eric Jackson, Senior Contributor

06/30/10 - 06:00 AM EDT

Stock quotes in this article: AAPL , GOOG, RIMM, NOK, MOT

What happened to Research in Motion(RIMM)?

It has been the king smartphones seemingly forever. Yet, it's stumbled badly. Last Thursday, it announced its new subscribers were less than analysts expected and the stock dropped 10% the following day.

Now there seem to be thousands of RIMM haters among hedge fund managers and investors. Why? Didn't it add almost 5 million net subscribers last quarter? How can it be dying with that kind of growth?

In the stock market, the focus is always on where companies are going - not where they've been. In the smartphone market, this is probably doubly true.

Motorola's(MOT) RAZR used to be the world's No. 1 selling phone for many years, and as late as 2007.

After former CEO Ed Zander quit the company, one of his successor's (Greg Brown) first marketing campaignswas a promotion of the newest incremental version of the RAZR. Management then said that the new version would help the RAZR on the top by being faster and sleeker. However, the new RAZR was a dud and we haven't talked about it since. That story is a warning sign for RIMM.

The mobile phone and now smartphone business is brutally competitive. There's no loyalty. What's hot today is ancient history tomorrow.

At a conference last month, Apple(AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs talked about how he liked the consumer market much more than the business market. His reasoning was that, in the consumer market, if you make a good device, people will buy it. If you don't, they won't.

In business, it's often not the end users who are making the purchase decisions, so inferior products can remain market leaders for years and years with no accountability.

The co-CEOs of RIMM (which has always been a terrible organizational structure which hasn't been previously questioned because of RIMM's prior success) should take a look at that Jobs interview. RIMM is about to be RAZR'ed in the consumer market by Apple's iPhone 4 and the new phones using Google's(GOOG) Android software which are popping up all over.

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[** This post is an excerpt of the full article, which is available on TheStreet.com by clicking here. Free Site.**]

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