The interview showed glimpses of desperation, edginess and plain frustration which speak volumes about RIM's approach to handling the drastically altered smart phone market.<p>Lazaridis kept using the words "singled out" - his reasoning behind it was because they were so successful. He was trying to convince that the carpet has not been pulled from below RIM's feet.<p>It showed that RIM doesn't really "get" it. They think the world is being unfair to them - they think <i>that</i> as a problem - not the facts that they couldn't get decent, modern smartphone hardware with a competent OS (for the market) out in years. They are just like Nokia - except they believe they have no problems.<p>Sure Blackberry has the best security architecture, it has never had security issues until they started using WebKit, lots of people still use it. There is no denying that. What is problematic is that those things do not matter in the battle that RIM is fighting against Android and iOS. No sane Joe with a dumb phone is going to find BB compelling for his smart phone upgrade. It's just not cool.<p>What RIM needs is a dual OS/dual hardware strategy - let the BB folks keep doing "Pro" phones like they do today with BB OS. Let a fresh hardware and software team look at producing great consumer phones with a consumer OS. The OS part of it is a big problem - I am sure RIM could put together a great phone after trying - not so sure about the OS part. They could be better off taking Android and making it better and distinct.
At this level, i.e. CEO, this is pure idiocy, you should have a canned response for such questions, in fact deflating such questions is part of your <i>job</i>, for heaven's sake!<p>And they <i>did</i> have problems in India and Middle East, where governments wanted access to emails. Rather than bailing out like this, RIM can turn it into a PR victory, like Google did with China, saying (i) "see how secure our systems are, governments can't break in" and (ii) "we are standing up for freedom, democracy, etc."
I don't understand his reaction, especially when RIM's position is perfectly defensible.<p>A reasonable response: "I want to assure our customers that the BlackBerry platform is, and will remain, secure, but it is necessary for RIM to follow the laws of the jurisdictions we operate in".
Rory Cellan-Jones, the interviewer, is a former colleague from my days at the BBC. Just to give some context, he is one of the BBC's most experienced business news journalists, in addition to being a more recent technology journalist.<p>But in a word of sound-bites and short-quotes, I'm surprised Rory didn't consider - or at least pick up after the initial rebuttal - that if Lazaridis in any way answered the question pivoted around security that it could cause a significant PR issue and even effect the share price of RIM (given it's a core value of RIM).<p>I'm totally across the issue being refereed to and to be fair, it isn't a security issue <i>to RIM</i>. Sure, it is a security issue to its users, potentially. But it's not that RIM has a security issue with its technology, it has a privacy issue from draconian laws while operating under certain government conditions.<p>But my reason for mentioning Rory is an experience business journalist is that this is not a technology matter, it's a subtle business-related matter, which I'd have thought Rory of all people would be cognizant of.
I strangely want to give kudos to both sides. The phrasing of 'the problems you've had in terms of security' is seriously misleading and very poorly worded. I guess I've never seen the behind the scenes legal voices jump in before, but clearly, that question is baiting (unless RIM has some security issues I'm unaware of).<p>On the other side, cool that the BBC posts this for all to see, rather than just hiding it away somewhere.<p>Though for the general public who don't know if RIM has a security flaw or not, what effect does something like this have??
Sounds to me like he misunderstood the question and assumed the Beeb were implying there's a serous security issue with the Blackberry device itself, when the question was actually about the "security" concerns of certain countries in which Blackberrys are sold.
I don't know how else the BBC could ask the question<p>RIM have never been upfront with a response to the question[1] (unlike Google, and others) and what you saw in that response from Lazaridis was more of his cool PR trained responses at work ('we are being singled out', 'we have a lot of issues'
etc. etc. blah blah balh)<p>[1] 'the question' is if RIM are providing backdoors to governments such as India, Russia et al to access encrypted messaging on the blackberry net
I think the way the question was worded could have confused people that are not familiar with the current situation between RIM and those countries. The question was worded in a way that made it sound like the device were insecure, but it is the very opposite, they are too secure by these countries standards. Lazaridis should have handled the question better by clarifying the question and then answering. He was not his best.
I found the final words of the interview the most striking:<p>>>This is not fair... What are you doing?... This is a national security issue.<p>A national security issue for who? The US? Can't journalists ask questions about national security issues anymore?<p>I can see why the US would be weary to have business people/officials traveling to a country where all their conversations can be monitored. But is this a CEO confirmation that the RIM india/pakistan issue has become a US national security issue now?<p>A gag order would be perfect cause for this rather strange interview-stopping behavior from someone I reckon has a lot of experience dealing with journalists.
Ironically for Lazaridis, this is the first I'd heard of RIM's "security problems in India and the Middle East" - anyone have a link to the original story?
You might want to update the link to the actual article rather than a BBC tech landing page. :-)
<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9456798.stm" rel="nofollow">http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9456798.s...</a>
Stephen Fry (also BBC) on Twitter this morning: "On way to meet Mike Lazarides of Blackberry. Excited: he was an absolute pioneer. Interested to know what's in the pipeline. Playbook etc."<p>I don't really understand, why would Fry tag along to someone else's interview?