A look at Blackberry (M)
When you think back to the brand names of mobile smartphones you’ve used down the years does Blackberry resonate with you? My only memories are TV shots of President Obama fiddling about with his Blackberry, but only when allowed to by his security minders.
Our first hand-held device was a Motorola which was about the size of a brick and could only receive and send out phone calls. Then we progressed to Nokias, Sanyos and Vodaphones where to send messages with one of them you needed to hit the top left-hand key, the number 1, four times just to get letter ‘D’. One click for ‘A’, two for ‘B’, three for ‘C’ and finally as your thumb grew numb a fourth click to free up letter ‘D’.
Anyway by 2007 Steve Jobs and his Apple iPhones hit the market and the competitive mobile devices market was virtually done and dusted. Still, Blackberry was a very viable outfit in the 1990s and early 2000s and an interesting quirk is it wasn’t a Silicon Valley invention, but hailed from Canada.
Canadian engineering graduates Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin, in their crowded Waterloo, Ontario office, managed to manufacture an interactive pager. It contained a network allowing users to send and receive e-mails and bit by bit the new devices started to be taken up by young buyers.
Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), a prematurely grey-haired science whiz, is more aware than partner Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson, who co-wrote and directed the film) that they need a marketing and promotions whiz to sell their invention. So out goes Lazaridis to find such a person and he winds up with Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) who’s certainly an energetic marketing man with experience, also in the tech sector.
He starts off as a reasonably likeable character, but gradually Balsillie starts to grate with the tech heads in the Ontario office. He outlaws staff video game breaks which Fregin had introduced to relieve the tensions floating around in the cramped office caused by the long, long hours the staff worked.
The final straw comes when Balsillie clamps down on the company Friday night movie breaks, again organised by Fregin. Still, as Blackberry becomes the No. 1 mobile device not just in Canada and the US but also across the globe, Balsillie’s discipline is seen to be paying off.
Lazaridis is too busy with the technical problems as Blackberry’s reach expands to question Balsillie.
But Fregin is convinced he’s being left behind.
And, as we know, the tech. industry moves along at a frantic pace. Blackberry’s newest innovations are picked up and surpassed by rival companies and it’s when the iPhones are launched that the juice is just about completely squeezed out of the Blackberry.
The end is nigh when manufacture of the phones is moved offshore to China and the final curtain starts to wind down. Lazaridis heads out to a storage warehouse, unpacks the first box he sees and knows virtually at an initial glance that the imported Blackberries are no good.
And one last important point. Just as in Oppenheimer there’s very few female characters.
The only one who leaves a mark is the head of the California office of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission who, after many brush-offs, finally buttonholes Lazaridis in his office.
australianrules.com.au 