Jim Balsillie Goes “Over The Top” Answering Earnings Call Question

If you have been reading BerryReview for even a few weeks you will know I appreciate a good rant. I missed this beautiful rant by Jim Balsillie in answer to a well worded question by Rod Hall of JP Morgan during the RIM earnings call tonight. Dan Frommer over at Business Insider has done a great job of transcribing it at this link. In short Rod asks Jim how RIM is going to make people believe that they can move to the head of the innovation pack instead of simply playing catch up.

Like most of Jim’s rants this one is mostly coherent with him only getting lost a few times. It is almost like a stream of consciousness and has some great points that get lost in the confusion. The first part of Jim’s answer is so great because it is exactly the direction RIM is moving with BlackBerry but are only half baked in the current BlackBerry 6 implementations. Jim goes on to praise how RIM is “redefining what a tablet should do” by pointing out things that are going to make the RIM PlayBook stick out.

• Rapid Desire for High Performance – seriously these are Jim’s words not mine! On one hand he touts how the PlayBook will trump the competition with high performance yet the flagship BlackBerry Torch is running a 2+ year old processor. The PlayBook will finally be the death of the BlackBerry hourglass. Hopefully RIM does not even have to add an hourglass at all! My other aim for the PlayBook is never having to reboot…
• Web Fidelity will hopefully bring a full on desktop browser to the BlackBerry PlayBook. While BlackBerry 6 also has a WebKit browser if you try to do anything complex with HTML5 like WebSQL then the whole thing chokes and dies. These are technologies that work just fine on a iOS or Android device.
• A non proprietary SDK and Tool Familiarity – (At least non proprietary to RIM in the case of Flash). The current BlackBerry OS SDK has plugins for Eclipse but is still mostly a black hole. RIM is working on the BlackBerry Development tools and they are making headway but they are nowhere near as easy to use as other mobile platforms. Now if only RIM would remove the frustrating code signing requirement.

Now can we get a lot of all three in my BlackBerry Torch? I would even just settle for high performance.

You really should read the rest of the unofficial transcript over at Business Insider or you can listen to the whole thing on RIM’s website at this link.