Cyberposium-15: Harvard Business School - Keynote by Jim Balsillie RIM Co-CEO

Cyberposium 15 was held this Saturday at Harvard Business School, an annual event to discuss technology with heavy emphasis on web tech and startup issues. The event is organized by an HBS student organization,TechMedia Club.

Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of RIM opened the event with a keynote speech discussing some of the business factors unique to the smartphone market and where he sees RIM heading.

A lot of people wondered if he would address the success of the iPhone in the consumer space, and since live tweeting was encouraged, it wasn't long before comments like these popped up:



Further commenters criticized Basillie for being so vague, citing straightforwardness goes hand in hand with presenting to a business school audience, moreso considering he'd refer to his competition as "the other guys". He did however stress the future of RIM in the following points:

RIM is not focused on application development and instead will focus on contextual experiences through its platform, deep rich integration into web services and business systems, and maintaining a concierge platform model.

Even when questioned by the audience to talk about competition from Apple and Android, Balsillie seemed to sidestep the issue. One guy in the audience even asked him, "If you were to buy a smartphone and the Blackberry wasn't an option, which would you buy?"

Balsillie showed a few slides describing how scarcity is a factor in RIM's business that must be accounted for in almost every sense - from the fact they must work through carrier partners to distribute devices, to hardware constraints like battery life, heat dissapation, processing power and keeping everything in a small form factor. Lastly, scarcity as a function of available bandwidth and technology to optimize that bandwidth and available spectrum it is contained.

Balsillie tied these points toegther to show how universally accepted truths like Moore's Law simply do not apply to smartphones.

Balsillie sees RIM's success having been based off one fundamentallly large bet (the role of email as the primary business communication method, followed by a series of small moves weighing out compromise from multiple angles.

Hope it works for you Jim -- but watch out for "the other guys".



This is part 1 of 3 in a series on Harvard Business School's Cyberposium-15, held on November 21st.  Check out parts 2 and 3 below:

Part 2: Startup Panel - Moderated by Don Dodge of Google
Part 3: Keynote Interview with Chad Hurley CEO of YouTube