Blackberry and humble pie 14.10.11

I like the RIM team in Waterloo, Ontario. I like the co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis (a RIM founder) and Jim Balsillie. When there has been much justified criticism of Apple's failure in the philanthropy stakes over the past week, RIM has been beyond generous establishing two C$100m foundations. I like them too because they agreed to help with funding so I could go out and see their senior management team and talk turkey when I was an MP.

This week has not been easy for them as an outage in their European HQ in Slough has caused a loss of service for 30m+ Blackberry users. 

This year has not been easy for them either with their share price in free fall. But they make them tough in Canada even if Mike L is originally from Turkey and RIM will survive another day though it still feels to me as if they'd be better off inside a larger company.

There will only be four global mobile players within the next 18 months: Apple is one and Google is another; Nokia might be...................