The Hatemonger Next Door

Richard Spencer sat sipping his chai latte at the Red Caboose, a train-themed coffee shop in downtown Whitefish, Mont. Clean-cut and restrained, he reminded me of a hundred outdoors-obsessed people I had known growing up here in the Flathead Valley, a resort area nestled in the shadows of Glacier National Park.

But Spencer’s tidy appearance is about more than his sense of propriety; it’s a recruitment tool. Spencer advocates for white separatism and he wants to shake his movement’s  reputation for brutality and backwardness.

“We have to look good,” Spencer said, adding that if his movement means ”being part of something that is crazed or ugly or vicious or just stupid, no one is going to want to be a part of it.” Those stereotypes of “redneck, tattooed, illiterate, no-teeth” people, Spencer said, are blocking his progress. Organizations that monitor domestic hate groups say it’s just this unthreatening approachability that makes Spencer so insidious.

Spencer says now, more than ever, it falls to people like him to be engaged and savvy if America is going to combat the growing threat of diversity. In particular, he’s irritated by the rise of U.S. minority births, which outnumbered white births for the first time in 2011.

“People have not really grasped that. Even if we shut off all immigration, the country is going to demographically undergo a tremendous transformation,” Spencer said. White people “need to start thinking about a new ethno-state that we would want to be a part of. This is not going to happen in the next election or in the next 10 years probably, but something in the future that would be for our great grandchildren.”

He’s open to founding a such an “ethno-state” in various locations in North America and even on the moon. Until then he’s found a home in this corner of the mountain West, where I grew up. At present, 96 percent of the population in Whitefish’s Flathead County is white.

Under the auspices of his blandly named  National Policy Institute, Spencer is working to create an intellectual class of white separatists. The organization’s editorial unit publishes “scientifically-based” books like “Race Differences in Intelligence” and “The Perils of Diversity.” The group rejects the calls for violence, which appear in Internet chat rooms and public campaigns of hate. Spencer prefers a more professorial approach of publishing books and organizing conferences. “Our goal is to form an intellectual community around European nationalism,” he wrote in an email.

Spencer and I emailed and spoke on the phone over a period of four months before I’d asked to meet him. I was living in Washington, but was planning a trip back home. Over the phone, he’d seemed radical. In person, he was easier to take, in conversation he meandered from D.C. landmarks and comic books to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Then we crashed into eugenics.

“We are undergoing a sad process of degeneration,” he said, coming back to minority births in the U.S. “We will need to reverse it using the state and the government. You incentivize people with higher intelligence, you incentivize people who are healthy to have children. And it sounds terrible and nasty, but there would be a great use of contraception.”

He didn’t mean the government should encourage people to use birth control pills and condoms. He was advocating for some type of government-forced sterilization.

“They could still enjoy sex. You are not ruining their life,” Spencer said.

Until this moment, I was alarmed by the number of times I had found myself nodding along with him. Spencer waxed indignant at the conquest of big box stores. And his obsession with clean living sounded like the house rules of a college co-op. Yes, I knew his views, but they were easy to forget until you breached the topic. But the way he called for a white ethno-state and forced sterilization chilled me. I had never heard anyone speak so calmly about something so abhorrent.

Spencer’s finesse may owe to the fact that he’s familiar with the culture he has come to despise. He didn’t grow up in a like-minded household. In fact he jokes that his parents probably “don’t agree” with his work entirely. Spencer, who’s now 35, came to embrace his ideology as a student at the University of Virginia and then continued further out on the ideological spectrum. He then obtained a master’s degree in humanities from the University of Chicago.

After a brief stint as an English teacher in Virginia, Spencer landed a job as an assistant editor at American Conservative magazine and later joined Taki’s Magazine, a paleoconservative webzine that gives a conservative take on politics and popular culture.

The site has come under fire in the past for promoting racist content. During the Trayvon Martin trial, it published an article by John Derbyshire that instructed white parents to encourage their children to stay out of predominately black neighborhoods and warned them to scrutinize black politicians more than whites. (The conservative magazine National Review fired Derbyshire after he wrote this screed.)

In 2010, Spencer founded  AlternativeRight, a webzine that promotes “heretical perspectives on society and culture.”  The next year, he took over as the chairman of the National Policy Institute and moved it to Montana. He has since became a speaker to like-minded audiences and gives regular video addresses on his website.

Spencer has appeared at the National Press Club in Washington and hosted Web seminars with Jared Taylor, a similarly polished promoter of what Taylor calls “race-realism,” and South African Dan Roodt, who has spent his life promoting Afrikaner rights and culture.  Spencer has spoken before Youth for Western Civilization, a student group that once took credit for chalking “white pride” around the campus of Towson University in Maryland.

In October, Spencer is hosting an international conference called “After the Fall: The Future of Identity” at the Reagan Building in Washington.

With me, he was slow to unmask his feeling about race. But around sympathizers he has been forthright.

During the American Renaissance conference in April, Spencer said, “The ideal I advocate is the creation of a White Ethno-State on the North American continent,” an idea he called “perfectly feasible.” During this speech he quoted Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, and said, “I have a dream.”

He also said: “Today, in the public imagination, ‘ethnic-cleansing’ has been associated with civil war and mass murder (understandably so).  But this need not be the case.  1919 is a real example of successful ethnic redistribution â€" done by fiat, we should remember, but done peacefully.” This is true if you consider setting the stage for World War II successful.

Rachel Carroll Rivas, the executive director of the Montana Human Rights Network, a group promoting cultural understanding and diversity in the state, says Spencer has stayed out of the community headlines, but says he shares the same goal as other white separatists in the area: to make the area all white. Spencer, she added, is waging a marketing campaign that repackages a classic brand of hate and selling it as a benign intellectual study. The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified Spencer as a leading academic racist.

For his part, Spencer rejects the notion that he is driven by hatred and considers “racist” a “slur word.” (“I guess ‘academic racist’ means: ‘We don’t like you … but you’re kinda smart.’  So, I guess I should take it as a compliment!” he wrote in an email.)

His website is evidence of his own duality. On the National Policy Institute’s home page, a photo of an attractive family gives the impression that the site is just another family values foundation, but if you click on the photo, a dark video depicting riots, shouting blacks and burning buildings unveils what NPI is really about.

The organization seeks to preserve the “heritage, identity and future of European people in the United States and Around the World.”  The “lesbians” and “Latinos” have advocates working for them, so why shouldn’t whites, Spencer asks in the video.

In the video, his voice is mixed over a metallic soundtrack as he intones, “As long as whites continue to avoid and deny their racial identity at a time when almost every other ethnic category is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to resist their disposition.”

This approach is far more sophisticated than that of the dozens of white supremacists who have moved to the Flathead Valley in recent years, as part of a shambolic effort to establish a white “ethno-state” there.

Spencer doesn’t interact much with the others in Montana. His supporters are younger and scattered around the world, from India to France. When I asked Spencer about the other like-minded crusaders in the region, he dismissed them as too overtly radical.

Spencer says he has no desire to advertise his views to his neighbors. “I don’t want to get in big disputes with anyone in Whitefish,” he says. “I would like this to be a place where I have a little bit of an anonymous status.”

“Our job is not to be reactionary in the sense that blacks commit a lot of crime or ‘we don’t like Mexican immigrants.’ All that stuff is real, but we don’t want to be any stupider than that and say, ‘Mussolini is my homeboy,’” Spencer says. “We need to be ahead of the game.”

Packing up, Spencer and I walked slowly out of the coffee shop together, returning to earlier conversations about Washington politics. As we shook hands and parted ways, I turned briefly to get a glimpse of him walking away. I couldn’t help being surprised that that same well-manicured man had just expressed so much hate.

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Science Is Pretty Certain Humans Are Responsible For Climate Change

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Scientists surer than ever humans play major role in climate change, report says
• Global warming already affecting extreme weather, and it could get worse, report says
• U.N.'s IPCC convenes every six years to put together report; it's considered benchmark on topic
• Even if emissions ended today, effects of climate change could linger for centuries

(CNN) -- The world's getting hotter, the sea's rising and there's increasing evidence neither are naturally occurring phenomena.

So says a report from the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change, a document released every six years that is considered the benchmark on the topic. More than 800 authors and 50 editors from dozens of countries took part in its creation.

The summary for policymakers was released early Friday, while the full report, which bills itself as "a comprehensive assessment of the physical science basis of climate change," will be distributed Monday. Other reports, including those dealing with vulnerability and mitigation, will be released next year.

Here are the highlights from Friday's summary:

Man-made climate change is almost certain

As scientists study receding ice in Greenland, many residents simply do what they've always done: adapt.

Greenland adapts to climate change

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Climate scientists are 95% confident -- that is to say, surer than ever -- that humans are responsible for at least "half of the observed increase in global average surface temperatures since the 1950s."

This is the major headline from the report, as it marks a stark spike in confidence over the last 12 years, as scientists were 90% confident in 2007 and 66% confident in 2001 of the same conclusion.

An increase in carbon dioxide concentrations that is "unprecedented" in the last 20,000 years, along with increases in other emissions, have driven up average temperatures by about 0.6 degrees Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit) since 1950, the report states.

Worst-case predictions are that by 2100, temperatures could increase by as much as 3.7 degrees Celsius (6.6 Fahrenheit), the report says.

Climate change is already affecting extreme weather

Since 1950 we've seen a dramatic increase in extreme weather. This is especially true of record heat and heavier precipitation events.

While it's difficult to determine the exact role climate change plays in an individual event, such as Hurricane Sandy or the EF-5 tornado that struck Moore, Oklahoma, because there are so many ingredients necessary to brew a single storm, the links are clearer when you look at overall patterns.

According to a study released this month in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, scientists found strong links between global warming and extreme weather around the globe in 2012.

Among the 2012 events were the July heat wave in the northeastern and north-central United States, the spring heat wave in the eastern United States, the Great Plains drought, the winter drought in Spain and Portugal and the heavy rains and flooding in Europe.

According to a paper in the journal Nature, this year, weather events that have previously been classified as "storms of the century" could become the storm of "every 20 years or less."

"Climate change will probably increase storm intensity and size simultaneously, resulting in a significant intensification of storm surges," the paper said.

The last 30-year period is "very likely" the warmest in the last 800 years

Scientists are 90% sure that 1981-2010 was the warmest such span in the last eight centuries, and there's a 66% chance that it was the warmest 30-year period in the last 1,400 years.

While the last 15 years have not warmed as quickly, we've seen steady warming over most of the globe, and we haven't seen a below-average temperature month since February 1985.

Scientists are also 99% certain that we will see more hot days and nights -- and fewer chilly ones -- as the 21st century progresses.

"Each of the last three decades has been significantly warmer than all preceding decades since 1850," according to the IPCC report.

To give you an idea of how the Earth has heated up, the combined land and ocean temperature increased by about 0.8 degrees Celsius between 1901 and 2010, yet between 1979 and 2010, the temperature spiked about 0.5 degrees Celsius.

Sea level rise will increase due to warming oceans and loss of ice

Better climate models give scientists more confidence that sea level rise will accelerate in the 21st century.

Scientists are 99% sure that sea level rise has accelerated over the last 2 centuries at a rate higher than at any time in the last 2,000 years.

They're also highly confident that if the global surface temperature increases by more than 2 degrees Celsius over present temperatures we could see "a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in late summer."

The report further notes that there is increasing evidence that ice sheets are losing mass, glaciers are shrinking, Arctic sea ice cover is diminishing, snow cover is decreasing and permafrost is thawing in the Northern Hemisphere.

As for the rise in sea level, scientists asserted in the IPCC report that tide gauges and satellite data make it "unequivocal" that the world's mean sea level is on the upswing.

Even if we end emission tomorrow, climate change could continue for centuries

This may be one of the more harrowing findings in the report, as it suggests we're too far gone to effect any meaningful change in our lifetimes.

Even if we end carbon dioxide emissions today, effects could linger for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And certain changes may already be irreversible.

"Many aspects of climate change will persist for centuries even if concentrations of greenhouse gases are stabilized. This represents a multicentury commitment created by human activities today," the report states.

CNN's Matt Smith and Tim Lister contributed to this report.

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Sunday, September 29, 2013

Christopher Boyce Was The Original Snowden

Christopher Boyce Handout photo courtesy courtesy Cait and Christopher Boyce

A smart young dropout is welcomed into a promising career in the top secret world of U.S. defense contracting, but he’s quickly shocked to discover the deception practiced by America’s intelligence agencies at the highest levels. Disillusioned and outraged, he takes matters into his own hands and begins exfiltrating highly-classified documents right under the nose of his employer.

Today, that might describe NSA leaker Edward Snowden. But back in 1975, it was 22-year-old Christopher Boyce, who joined TRW as a telex operator and found himself handling some of the the government’s most sensitive communications. From inside TRW’s “Black Vault,” Boyce claims he learned the CIA was actively undermining the elected, left-wing government of Australia.

But instead of leaking to the press, as Snowden, and WikiLeaks leaker Chelsea Manning, would do decades later, Boyce became a spy. He embarked on a personal mission to damage the U.S. defense and intelligence complex, supplying classified crypto keys and program information to his friend Andrew Daulton Lee, who in turn traveled to Mexico and sold the information to the KGB.

Boyce and Lee were arrested in 1977 and both convicted of espionage.

In January 1980 Boyce escaped from the Lompoc federal penitentiary and went on the run, robbing 17 banks in Idaho and Washington State before being recaptured in August 1981. He was released from prison in 2002 and now lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, Cait.

The saga was the subject of the book and film The Falcon and the Snowman, but now Boyce, his wife Cait and their friend Vincent Font have published their own e-book sequel, The Falcon and the Snowman: American Sons.

Boyce spoke to WIRED about the changing face of espionage; WikiLeaks, Manning, Snowden and the radically changed world that awaited him when he walked out of prison.

WIRED: What do you think of the Snowden leaks?

Boyce: Well I think he’s done a service to the Bill of Rights. I think he’s protecting our freedoms. I’m glad he did what he did, I think it’s too bad that he wound up in … Putin’s Russia, he should have gone to Venezuela or somewhere else. But I’m glad he did what he did, and I’m glad Manning released what he released, and I hope there are other contractors our there contemplating a similar move.

I think that if contractors are going to leak info they need to go where they’re going to have asylum, stay there and then leak. And then that way the story becomes what they’re leaking and not the chase.

The chase is over, and it appears he’s going to stay where he’s going to stay and I’m sure the Guardian and other persons have copies of everything he got. It does seem like every time the government opens their mouth, he just releases more compromising information that makes them look like fools.

WIRED: If you were 30 years younger, do you think you would have been more like an Edward Snowden than someone who was going to sell secrets to the Russians?

Boyce: I have a quarter of a century of experience in the federal prison [system]. I almost spent 10 years in solitary confinement, and I just don’t think I could ever do that to myself again. I couldn’t bring the rage of the government down on my head again. Snowden’s a braver man than I would be now. I couldn’t do that again, and I’m sure there are hundreds and hundreds of other NSA contractors who also are thinking, ‘I couldn’t bring the power of the fed government down on me like that.’

He’s a better man than I am at this stage of my life, I suppose I’m a bit worn out by it all.

But there’s a big difference now â€" it’s so much easier to release stuff. Back then, even if you went to a New York Times reporter, how would you know they wouldn’t go to the FBI?

WIRED: Given that, do you think there’s a role for organizations like WikiLeaks?

Boyce: I think that eventually the U.S. government will get their hands on [Assange] too … I think they’ll eventually get him. But yeah, I wish there were another 100 outlets like WikiLeaks out there. And I’m sure there are many people that want to repeat WikiLeaks [MO] but the problem as I see it is I had always thought the Internet was going to be this thing that opened up the world. When I came out of prison I went “wow,” this was going to be what united people everywhere, what created a free flow of information.

But instead it seems to me that it’s become something for the government to monitor and watch us, to collect our emails and monitor who we’re calling and how long we’re speaking to them. I’m kind of shocked by that, by Snowden’s revelations. I thought the internet was going to be something that broke down secrecy, but it appears that the NSA and the British are using it for evil purposes and destroying our civil liberties in the process.

WIRED: What would you like to see happen? At what point would you be satisfied that things are on track?

Boyce: Well I think that I’d like to have real review and then specifically why should the government record all of our email? Why do they need to keep a record of everyone we call and how long we speak? Things like these are abuses, I think.

They need to go. Will they go? I doubt it. In this country, all of our addresses and return addresses on all our packages and letters are photographed now by the post office. Why is that necessary? That just seems to me like overkill.

I think everything since 9/11 has been. The Patriot Act and all this, it’s all overkill. It’s overreach by the surveillance state.

WIRED: Assange thought that if he published a whole bunch of information and enlightened the public with these revelations that things would change. Nothing has really changed since the WikiLeaks dumps.

We’ve got Ed Snowden also, who’s releasing all these secrets. Things might change but nothing has yet. So to what degree do you think the ‘problem’ is the public doesn’t have access to enough information about what governments are doing versus the problem being just general apathy?

Boyce: Well, I agree with what my wife Cait said here not so long ago: The average American is more interested in how much cream and sugar he has in his coffee than his civil liberties.

I have to tell you that I’m very pessimistic. I think the surveillance state will get stronger and stronger. I’m not optimistic at all that civil liberties are going to be protected, and I think that’s the direction that we’re headed. [...]

What shocked me was the NSA is forcing the communications and internet companies and the security companies to leave these backdoors in their security systems, so we really don’t have any privacy whatsoever. But the good thing you can say about Snowden is that now this has all come to light people are talking about it. Will Congress do anything about it? I doubt it, but at least this allows Google and the other internet companies to push back and to fight this intrusion into the internet.

But you can tell just from talking to me, I’m not a technical person. I’m 60 years old and I lost 25 years of my life while all this developed.

WIRED: We’ve taken information and made it infinitely and instantly replicable, which is why we’ve wound up with WikiLeaks and people taking huge caches of documents. So the idea of using a camera to smuggle out a few documents [like you did] these days is just completely foreign.

Boyce: I used to smuggle out secret documents hidden in potted plants. If Snowden had to do that he would have been at it for a million years. Especially Manning, God.

WIRED: What do you think Andrew Daulton Lee would think of you now?

Boyce: Well the truth is, when I escaped that made his incarceration much more onerous. Bad things happened to him. He was taken to Eastern penitentiaries, he was assaulted and attacked. His life became much worse for him after I escaped, and he probably ended up doing more time because I escaped.

He holds that against me and I understand that, I just wasn’t, myself, going to stay in that prison if there was any way I could break out of it, [but] he was done taking risks with his life at that point. And so it’s legitimate, I think, the animosity that he has towards me. I definitely, from that point on, made his life worse.

You know, I think of Daulton as the friend of my childhood, a pal that I had that I flew hawks with and played football with and went to school with. I think of him like that, but I don’t really think of him now that much, other than I regret we’re no longer friends.

WIRED: We’ve got leakers like Chelsea Manning and Snowden. If I put you in the same category, the three of you had ideological motivations for taking classified information and pushing it out into the public domain. Except in your case you took this information and gave it to the Russians. I’m wondering how it is that you can morally justify the decision to hand over those things to an enemy of the U.S.

Boyce: Well, I myself did not sell them. My co-defendant did. I had never really intended that was how it should play out. But mainly I was just so fed up with the American intelligence community that I wanted to damage them. I just went off on a one-man war against the intelligence community. As ridiculous as that sounds, that’s was what I was doing.

WIRED: To what degree do you think your motivations and the motivations of someone like Chelsea Manning are actually the same? Because they seem strikingly similar.

Boyce: I had an utterly conservative upbringing, but as I grew up I watched the Vietnam War unfolding, I watched the assassinations, I watched all of the racial riots and I watched the impeachment of President Nixon.

The Federal government was becoming worse and worse and I really had no experience growing up as a young man in the national government becoming anything but more and more, in my eyes, evil, to the point where I just utterly rejected the whole thing.

I was looking for a big enemy to fight. I don’t know what’s in my personality that caused me to do that but I wanted a big powerful enemy to joust.

WIRED: Do you see common ground with Manning?

Boyce: I would think so. But I also think Manning was utterly repulsed by all of the content of much of what he was revealing. Honestly, I just feel sorry for the guy, and I feel sorry for Snowden because I eventually think they’ll get their hands on him and I think the Department of Justice is going to turn their lives into a living nightmare.

I don’t think that he’ll stay in Russia forever, and I think eventually they’ll get him.

But it’s my fervent hope that among those hundred, thousands of contractors that there are others like him who are just as appalled as he is who are willing to put their lives on the line to protect civil liberties. If we have any hope, that’s where it lies.

This interview has been edited. For the full interview with Boyce, tune in to Patrick Gray’s Risky Business podcast.

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Inside The Fall Of BlackBerry

This investigative report reveals that:

• Shortly after the release of the first iPhone, Verizon asked BlackBerry to create a touchscreen “iPhone killer.” But the result was a flop, so Verizon turned to Motorola and Google instead.

• In 2012, one-time co-CEO Jim Balsillie quit the board and cut all ties to BlackBerry in protest after his plan to shift focus to instant-messaging software, which had been opposed by founder Mike Lazaridis, was killed by current CEO Thorsten Heins.

  

  Michael Lazaridis, President and co-chief executive officer and co-founder, left, and Jim Balsillie, co-chief executive officer receive applause as they take their seats at the start of the Blackberry maker's AGM in Waterloo, July 12, 2011. J.P. Moczulski for The Globe and Mail

  Timeline

  Timeline: The rise and fall of BlackBerry

  

  Bold For many die-hard BlackBerry fans, the Bold line of smartphones constitutes perhaps the best devices the company has ever made. The first Bold devices, featuring BlackBerry’s distinctive keyboard, was released in 2008, when the company was still the leading smartphone powerhouse. REUTERS

  gallery

  In pictures: The evolution of BlackBerry's mobile devices

• Mr. Lazaridis opposed the launch plan for the BlackBerry 10 phones and argued strongly in favour of emphasizing keyboard devices. But Mr. Heins and his executives did not take the advice and launched the touchscreen Z10, with disastrous results

Late last year, Research In Motion Ltd. chief executive officer Thorsten Heins sat down with the board of directors at the company’s Waterloo, Ont., headquarters to review plans for the launch of a new phone designed to turn around the company’s fortunes.

His weapon was the BlackBerry Z10, a slim device with the kind of glass touchscreen that had made Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. the dominant names in the global smartphone market.

But one of RIM’s directors was frustrated by what he saw, and spoke out, according to one person who was in the room. There is a cultural problem at RIM, he told the group, and the Z10 was a glaring manifestation of it.

The speaker was none other than Michael Lazaridis, the genius behind the BlackBerry, the company’s co-founder and its former co-CEO. Minutes earlier, he said, he had spoken with Mr. Heins’s newest executive recruits, chief marketing officer Frank Boulben and chief operating officer Kristian Tear.

Mr. Boulben and Mr. Tear had dismissively told Mr. Lazaridis that the market for keyboard-equipped mobile phones â€" RIM’s signature offering â€" was dead.

In the board meeting, Mr. Lazaridis pointed to a BlackBerry with a keyboard. “I get this,” he said. “It’s clearly differentiated.” Then he pointed to a touchscreen phone. “I don’t get this.”

To turn away from a product that had always done well with corporate customers, and focus on selling yet another all-touch smartphone in a market crowded with them, was a huge mistake, Mr. Lazaridis warned his fellow directors. Some of them agreed.

The boardroom confrontation was a telling moment in the downfall of Research In Motion.

Once the giant of the smartphone business, RIM, which was renamed BlackBerry Ltd. in the summer, is now on its knees. The company reported a $965-million (U.S.) fiscal second-quarter loss Friday, primarily because of a massive writedown of Z10 phones that sit, unsold and unwanted, about eight months after they first hit the market. The company is cutting 4,500 jobs, 40 per cent of its work force, in a desperate bid to bring costs in line with plummeting revenue.

Investors, who have lived through the destruction of more than $75-billion of the company’s market value over the past five years, are still wondering how BlackBerry managed to blow its runaway lead and became a bit player in the smartphone market it invented.

An investigation by The Globe and Mail, which included interviews with two dozen past and present company insiders, exposes a series of deep rifts at the executive and boardroom levels.

Those divisions hurt the company’s ability to develop products just as it faced its greatest challenge from more nimble and creative rivals â€" and contributed to the downfall of Canada’s biggest technology company.

Once a fast-moving innovator that kept two steps ahead of the competition, RIM grew into a stumbling corporation, blinded by its own success and unable to replicate it. Several years ago, it owned the smartphone world: Even U.S. President Barack Obama was a BlackBerry addict. But after new rivals redefined the market, RIM responded with a string of devices that were late to market, missed the mark with consumers, and opened dangerous fault lines across the organization.

Months before their boardroom showdown, Mr. Heins and Mr. Lazaridis found themselves in another strategic standoff in which they were pitted against Jim Balsillie, Mr. Lazaridis’s long-time business partner and co-CEO.

Inside RIM, the brash Mr. Balsillie had championed a bold strategy to re-establish the company’s place at the forefront of mobile communications. The plan was to push wireless carriers to adopt RIM’s popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant messaging service as a replacement for their short text messaging system (SMS) applications â€" no matter what kind of phone their customers used.

It was a novel plan. If RIM could get BBM onto hundreds of millions of non-BlackBerry phones, and charge fees for it, the company would have an enormous new source of profit, Mr. Balsillie believed. “It was a really big idea,” said an employee who was involved in the project.

But the plan ran into stiff opposition at senior levels. Not long after Mr. Heins took over as RIM’s CEO in January, 2012, he killed it, with Mr. Lazaridis’s support.

That was it for Mr. Balsillie. Weeks later, he resigned from the board and cut his ties to the company.

“My reason for leaving the RIM board in March, 2012, was due to the company’s decision to cancel the BBM cross-platform strategy,” Mr. Balsillie said in a brief statement to The Globe and Mail, his first public comments on his departure. He declined a request for an interview.

Mr. Lazaridis, who declined to speak about board matters, resigned as a director this past March after delaying his retirement by a year at the board's request.

Now, BlackBerry’s future is in doubt. This week, Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd., a Toronto-based investment company, announced a plan to lead a $4.7-billion takeover of the company. The offer is conditional, and requires a group of so-far uncommitted institutional investors to back Fairfax and provide financing.

The company’s near-collapse is a painful situation for Mr. Lazaridis, a gifted engineer who co-founded RIM in a tiny Waterloo office above a bagel shop in 1984.

“It’s really hurting me,” he said in an interview. “I can’t imagine what the employees must be thinking. Everyone is talking about the most likely scenario being that it will be broken up and sold off for parts. What will happen to the Waterloo region, or Canada? What company will take its place?”

Competition rising

Mike Lazaridis was at home on his treadmill and watching television when he first saw the Apple iPhone in early 2007. There were a few things he didn’t understand about the product. So, that summer, he pried one open to look inside and was shocked. It was like Apple had stuffed a Mac computer into a cellphone, he thought.

To Mr. Lazaridis, a life-long tinkerer who had built an oscilloscope and computer while in high school, the iPhone was a device that broke all the rules. The operating system alone took up 700 megabytes of memory, and the device used two processors. The entire BlackBerry ran on one processor and used 32 MB. Unlike the BlackBerry, the iPhone had a fully Internet-capable browser. That meant it would strain the networks of wireless companies like AT&T Inc., something those carriers hadn’t previously allowed. RIM by contrast used a rudimentary browser that limited data usage.

“I said, ‘How did they get AT&T to allow [that]?’ Mr. Lazaridis recalled in the interview at his Waterloo office. “ ‘It’s going to collapse the network.’ And in fact, some time later it did.”

Publicly, Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Balsillie belittled the iPhone and its shortcomings, including its short battery life, weaker security and initial lack of e-mail. That earned them a reputation for being cocky and, eventually, out of touch. “That’s marketing,” Mr. Lazaridis explained. “You position your strengths against their weaknesses.”

Internally, he had a very different message. “If that thing catches on, we’re competing with a Mac, not a Nokia,” he recalled telling his staff.

RIM soon earned a chance to show up its new rival. RIM’s early smartphones had been a hit for Verizon Wireless, one of the biggest U.S. wireless players. Frozen out of the iPhone â€" Apple had signed an exclusive deal with AT&T â€" Verizon executives approached RIM in June, 2007, and asked if it could develop “an iPhone killer.” The product would need to have a touchscreen with no physical keyboard. Verizon would back the U.S. launch with a massive marketing campaign.

RIM executives jumped at the chance. At one management meeting, Mr. Balsillie called it RIM’s most important strategic opportunity since the launch of its two-way e-mail pager.

The product was the BlackBerry Storm. It was the most complex and ambitious project the company had ever done, but “the technology was cobbled together quickly and wasn’t quite ready,” said one former senior company insider who was involved in the project.

The product was months late, hitting the market just before U.S. Thanksgiving in 2008. Many customers hated it. The touchscreen, RIM’s first, was awkward to manipulate. The product ran on a single processor and was slow and buggy. Mr. Balsillie put on a brave face, declaring the launch to be “an overwhelming success,” but sales lagged the iPhone and customer returns were high.

The Storm campaign didn’t seem so disastrous at the time: RIM was in the midst of a torrid global expansion. In August, 2009, Fortune crowned it the world’s fastest-growing company. A year after the Storm launch, market research firm comScore reported that four of the top five smartphones U.S. customers intended to buy in the next three months were BlackBerrys.

But the Storm had failed to give Verizon Wireless the Apple-killer it coveted, and RIM soon abandoned the product. So the carrier turned to Google Inc. and its new operating system, Android, and built a massive marketing campaign around Motorola’s Droid phone in 2009 â€" at the expense of marketing dollars to support BlackBerry products. Verizon’s “iDon’t” campaign highlighted all the shortcomings of the iPhone that Android addressed with its consumer-friendly user interface.

Rather than hurt Apple, the Droid and other Android-powered phones began to steal share first from Palm and Microsoft, and then RIM. By December, 2010, Android’s market share in the U.S. had grown to 23.5 per cent from 5.2 per cent a year earlier, as RIM’s dropped by 10 points, to 31.6 per cent, according to comScore. By late 2011, Android commanded 47.3 per cent of the U.S. market, while RIM had just 16 per cent.

A shift by smartphone users

This post-iPhone period was an era of strategic confusion for RIM. The overall state of the industry “was a bit schizophrenic,” said Patrick Spence, RIM’s former executive vice-president of global sales, who left in 2012. “There was a time when the [wireless] carriers tried to keep data usage predictable. Then it shifted to a period of trying to drive much more usage in different packages, when the iPhone became compelling.”

If there were new rules of the game, RIM would require new tools. The summer after the Storm launched, Mr. Lazaridis bought Torch Mobile, a software development firm that created Internet browsers for mobile phones.

But the process of moving, or “porting,” the Torch browser onto RIM’s highly-customized system proved complex and time-consuming. RIM’s technology was based on Java computer code and an operating system built in the 1990s, while the Apple and Android systems used newer software platforms and standards that made it easier to build friendlier user interfaces. “This really meant we were not positioned for the future,” Mr. Lazaridis said. In order to survive, RIM would have to change its DNA.

RIM executives figured they had time to reinvent the company. For years they had successfully fended off a host of challengers. Apple’s aggressive negotiating tactics had alienated many carriers, and the iPhone didn’t seem like a threat to RIM’s most loyal base of customers â€" businesses and governments. They would sustain RIM while it fixed its technology issues.

But smartphone users were rapidly shifting their focus to software applications, rather than choosing devices based solely on hardware. RIM found it difficult to make the transition, said Neeraj Monga, director of research with Veritas Investment Research Corp. The company’s engineering culture had served it well when it delivered efficient, low-power devices to enterprise customers. But features that suited corporate chief information officers weren’t what appealed to the general public.

“The problem wasn’t that we stopped listening to customers,” said one former RIM insider. “We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did. Consumers would say, ‘I want a faster browser.’ We might say, ‘You might think you want a faster browser, but you don’t want to pay overage on your bill.’ ‘Well, I want a super big very responsive touchscreen.’ ‘Well, you might think you want that, but you don’t want your phone to die at 2 p.m.’ “We would say, ‘We know better, and they’ll eventually figure it out.’ ”

Trying to satisfy its two sets of customers â€" consumers and corporate users â€" could leave the company satisfying neither. When RIM executives showed off plans to add camera, game and music applications to its products to several hundred Fortune 500 chief information officers at a company event in Orlando in 2010, they weren’t prepared for the backlash that followed. Large corporate customers didn’t want personal applications on corporate phones, said a former RIM executive who attended the session.

Meanwhile, it turned out consumers didn’t care so much about battery life or security features. They wanted apps. Apple’s iOs and Google’s Android systems were relatively easy for outside software developers to use, compared to BlackBerry’s technically complicated Java-based system.

Blackberry’s apps looked “uglier” than those programmed in more modern languages, and the simulator used to test the apps often didn’t recreate the actual experience, said Trevor Nimegeers, a Calgary-based entrepreneur whose software company, Wmode, has developed apps for BlackBerry. Further, RIM exerted tight control over developers before it would sign off on their apps for use on BlackBerrys, stifling creativity. “Developers wanted to be embraced, not controlled,” Mr. Nimegeers said. As a result, hot apps such as Instagram and Tumblr bypassed BlackBerry.

A split company

One key to RIM’s early success was its corporate structure. It is unusual for a company to have two CEOs â€" Mr. Lazaridis focused on engineering, product management and supply chain, while Mr. Balsillie looked after sales, finance and other corporate functions â€" but for a long time, it worked. Mr. Lazaridis’s side of the shop made the phones, and Mr. Balsillie’s sold them. The two men were collegial and collaborative.

Below the top executives, however, the two sides of the company didn’t always get along. And as the company grew into a leviathan with $20-billion in annual sales, the structure sometimes made it difficult to get definitive decisions or establish clear accountability. That contributed to a chronic problem for RIM: speed. “They were always slow to market, and there were always delays in launching,” said James Moorman, an analyst with S&P Capital IQ Equity Research. “It was compounded by miscalculating the speed at which the consumer market changed.”

Sometimes, feedback from customers that might inspire changes would die at middle management, because senior executives didn’t want to bring it to Mr. Lazaridis, a former insider said.

The split company also lost a major unifying force when chief operating officer Larry Conlee retired in 2009. Mr. Conlee was a whip-cracker who held executives to account for decisions and deadlines, establishing a project management office. Many insiders agreed that after he left, a slack attitude toward hitting targets began to permeate the company. “There was a gap” after Mr. Conlee’s departure, Adam Belsher, a former RIM vice-president, told The Globe last year. “There was no real operational executive on the product side that would really get teams to hit deadlines.”

After relying on its own technology for so long, Mr. Lazaridis decided the company’s next advance would come from outside. In April, 2010, RIM announced a deal to acquire Ottawa-based QNX Software, a cutting-edge software maker that would provide the building blocks for the BlackBerry 10 operating system â€" the new platform Mr. Lazaridis knew the company needed.

QNX was a specialist in industrial controls that used up-to-date software tools to run applications ranging from 911 call centres to wireless broadband services in vehicles. Its technology was the perfect core for smartphones and tablets, RIM’s leaders felt.

Mr. Lazaridis decided to take a page from the business strategy book The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. The book outlines how established organizations that succeeded against challengers often did so by allowing small, cloistered teams to develop their own disruptive products, free from the influence of the rest of the organization.

Mr. Lazaridis decided he would isolate the QNX team and get them to focus solely on the new operating system, while leaving existing programmers to work on products for its existing platform, BlackBerry 7. Eventually he hoped QNX, led by its CEO Dan Dodge, would retrain his entire organization.

But first, RIM had to answer a key question: If it wanted to remake the BlackBerry on the QNX system, what was the best way to do that? Should it move over some of its old Java-based applications, or rewrite them all from scratch? If the company abandoned Java altogether, what would it mean for third-party developers who used it?

These were not easy decisions. Discussions among the senior leaders in Mr. Lazaridis’ organization dragged on for a year â€" far too long, according to several insiders.

Eventually, the decision was made: BlackBerry 10 would be built from scratch. The problem with that approach was that a new team was being entrusted to recreate the BlackBerry. Those who had created the original system were still working on devices for the BlackBerry 7 platform. Once again, the company was split.

“We had bought a powerful operating system and needed to move to it. But the BB7 was late,” Mr. Lazaridis said. “Every week, I was getting requests for more hires, more resources. The conundrum was, how do I pull resources off the BB7 to rewrite all the apps on top of QNX?”

PlayBook pain

The QNX team’s first assignment was to work on an operating system for the PlayBook, RIM’s answer to Apple’s successful iPad tablet. Mr. Lazaridis saw the work as a precursor to the BlackBerry 10 line of smartphones and was impressed by what the team brought to the product. “It helped our developers experience the power and elegance of QNX,” he said.

But the QNX team was overwhelmed and needed to draw heavily on the company’s other resources to complete the PlayBook. Similar issues arose later on the BlackBerry 10. The tablet, originally slated to come out in the fall of 2010, didn’t appear until April, 2011, and it failed to sell. It was an awkward accessory to RIM’s smartphones, and lacked e-mail, contacts and apps. Once again, RIM had missed the mark: Tablets that sold well worked as standalone devices, which the PlayBook wasn’t.

Some questioned the wisdom of launching the PlayBook in the first place, feeling it was a needless and costly distraction. And the decision to isolate QNX also created tensions and morale problems: Those who weren’t on the team worried about their future.

“To me, the most logical thing would have been to integrate the operating system organizations into one,” said one senior executive who was caught up in the fray. “Then you’d have a whole team, not 150 people sitting around saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do next,’ and another 150 people saying ‘I’m over my head.’ ”

Meanwhile, RIM’s lack of an advanced smartphone meant that it continued to bleed market share to Apple and Android, especially in the United States. In December, 2010, Verizon Wireless announced it would invest in fourth generation (4G) LTE technology to accommodate the growing demands of customers who wanted to surf the Internet on their phones. It signalled to device makers that it would look to feature 4G smartphones in its marketing.

RIM’s 4G phone effort was the BlackBerry 10, but it was far from ready. RIM executives tried to make an engineering argument to carriers that 4G technology was no more efficient than 3G, and that its Bold phones were just fine. Mr. Lazaridis, Mr. Heins and chief technology officer David Yach “were trying to reshape the argument because they knew our products couldn’t go there,” a former executive said. “It was a fight to stay in [promotional] programs with carriers. We lost channel support and feature ads.”

The PlayBook debacle and mounting delays of the BlackBerry 10 harmed the organization in other ways.

For years, Mr. Yach and Mr. Lazaridis had enjoyed a close working relationship. But as the well-regarded Mr. Yach began to question the company’s ability to hit deadlines on products, his views were dismissed and he was made to feel he wasn’t a team player, damaging their relationship, observers said. He left the company in early 2012.

The PlayBook flop merely added to the sense of a company in decline; 2011 became a significant turning point for RIM. As it became clear the brand was getting trounced in the market, and the BlackBerry 10 project was hit by significant delays, the stock plunged, falling from $69 (Canadian) in February to less than $15 by the year’s end.

The pressure mounted on Mr. Balsillie, Mr. Lazaridis and the board. In January, 2012, they stepped aside as co-CEOs and handed it over to Thorsten Heins, a German executive who had run the company’s handset division.

Almost immediately, there was division about how to roll out the BlackBerry 10. The original strategy had called for the company to launch an all-touchscreen version first, because sales were still going well for the company’s BlackBerry 7 keyboard phone.

But by 2012, sales of BlackBerry 7 phones had lost steam, and Mr. Lazaridis, now deputy chairman, felt the company should switch its priority to getting a keyboard version out, to meet the demand from BlackBerry die-hards.

“This is our bread and butter, our iconic device,” he told an executive at the company. “The keyboard is one of the reasons they buy BlackBerrys.”

Mr. Heins’s new management team held firm, sources close to the board said. “They believed everything was going to full touch” and that the QNX-designed system was clearly superior to what was available on other mobile operating systems.

To Mr. Lazaridis, abandoning the company’s competitive advantage in the hopes consumers would embrace yet another touchscreen was too risky a strategy, setting up the showdown at the board last year. In the end, management agreed to continue developing the Q10 keyboard phone. But the all-touchscreen Z10 would be launched first.

By the time the first BlackBerry 10 smartphones were unveiled in January of this year, market observers generally agreed that the products were two years too late â€" a view widely shared among many senior RIM insiders.

“Buying QNX was the right play ultimately,” said Mr. Spence. “But we didn’t make the turn fast enough. Everyone underestimated the complexity” involved in building the new system.

A BBM plan

For 20 years, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis operated in tandem, building an increasingly successful partnership that allowed each other’s strengths to flourish.

They shared an office in their early years, even possessing each other’s voice mail passwords.

As RIM grew, they worked in separate buildings but spoke several times a day. “They had a relationship I wish I had with my wife,” one mid-level executive said.

But they had different personalities and their lives seldom intersected outside the office. They have barely spoken since leaving the company.

For Mr. Lazaridis, science was both a job and a pastime. Mr. Balsillie was brash, competitive and athletic, and wore his reputation for being aggressive, even bullying in meetings, as a badge of honour. If anything, he viewed that outward toughness as a job requirement, not unlike tech CEOs such as Steve Ballmer at Microsoft Corp. or Apple’s Steve Jobs. “Show me how else you build a $20-billion company,” he once confided to a colleague. “If I was Mr. Easy-going, they would kill BlackBerry.”

The two rarely disagreed on key strategic moves â€" until their last year together. Mr. Lazaridis believed BlackBerry 10 would herald RIM’s renaissance. Mr. Balsillie wasn’t so sure.

Mr. Balsillie was concerned that Google had commoditized the smartphone market by making its Android operating system available for free to any handset maker. By 2011, wireless carriers were warning him that they would be ordering fewer BlackBerry products unless he dropped his prices to match rival manufacturers.

So Mr. Balsillie pushed an alternative plan.

The idea started with Aaron Brown, the executive who oversaw the services division at RIM. By 2010, this division was earning $800-million per quarter in revenue from the monthly service access fee it charged mobile carriers for every BlackBerry subscriber. More than 90 per cent of that was profit. Carriers tried to chip away at those fees â€" Google and Apple didn’t charge them â€" but RIM always pushed back. Mr. Balsillie was particularly insistent on keeping the service fees. But the executives knew the company’s weakening position in devices would increase pressure on services revenues as well.

Even after its terrible year in 2011, RIM still had several advantages, including close relationships with the world’s major carriers. It also had BlackBerry Messenger.

RIM developers created the BBM app in 2005 to enable users to communicate not by e-mail but by using their devices’ “personal identification numbers” or PINs. It was the first instant messaging service built for wireless devices, and it caught on quickly. It was reliable, free, always on and users could send as many messages as they wanted at no extra cost, unlike basic text messages. PINs were random codes, not phone numbers or e-mail addresses, enhancing privacy. That made BBM extremely popular in countries where citizens didn’t enjoy as many freedoms as Western democracies, and helped drive handset sales there.

BBM’s developers added a few clever elements that also made it addictive. For example, users would know when a message had been delivered and when it had been read, marked D and R. Today there are 60 million monthly active users.

But BBM only worked on BlackBerrys. As Apple and Android took off, BBM knock-offs appeared that could function on those devices, including Kik Interactive Inc., founded by Ted Livingston, a former RIM co-op student. Today Kik, boasts 85 million users, more than BlackBerry (which sued Mr. Livingston for allegedly copying its program). Others, such as WhatsApp, are even larger. Instant messaging “is the killer app of the mobile era,” Mr. Livingston said. “We think there will be a Google or Facebook-sized company that comes out of this category.”

RIM’s Mr. Brown believed he could tap into this unfolding trend. While working with Mr. Balsillie on other projects, around late 2010 and early 2011, he began to talk up the concept of offering BBM on other mobile platforms.

Mr. Balsillie loved it. At the time, some carriers were pushing for rebates on their monthly service fees. Mr. Brown was willing to comply if the carriers would agree to open new parts of their business to RIM. He and Mr. Balsillie struck upon an idea: Why not give carriers the opportunity to offer BBM to all their customers â€" no matter what devices they used?

Most wireless executives were not fans of instant messaging services and other “over-the-top” apps such as Skype because they eroded the carriers’ revenue from text messaging.

To counter that threat, carriers banded together to develop a standardized “rich communication service” (RCS) platform that would enable their customers to exchange text messages, videos, games and other digital information. But the initiative has gained little traction; one commentator recently labelled RCS a “zombie technology.”

SMS 2.0

Mr. Balsillie began floating the idea that carriers could instead offer BBM as their own enhanced version of text messaging, generating revenue for carriers while providing a cut for RIM. He called it “SMS 2.0.” (SMS stands for “short message service.”) RIM would agree to reduce the fees it charged for services, in exchange for gaining access to hundreds of millions of non-BlackBerry users.

He and Mr. Brown discussed several options. For example, carriers could offer BBM as part of a standard “talk and text” plan for entry-level smartphone users. Because of its extra functions, BBM would save customers from having to buy a data plan.

Or, carriers could offer an expensive plan that included BBM and other offerings from BlackBerry, including one gigabyte of cloud storage on which they could keep photos or songs. The carriers could then sell extra services such as radio through BBM. It would also make the wireless companies’ customers “stickier” â€" less likely to defect â€" since they couldn’t move stored data to rival mobile carriers as easily.

The SMS 2.0 plan was a throwback to RIM’s move a decade earlier to form partnerships with mobile providers and share revenues. It was a chance to make BBM the dominant chat messaging service, and would have created a new story

for the BlackBerry brand.

A few carriers responded positively to Mr. Balsillie’s initial entreaties and by mid-2011, he was calling SMS 2.0 the company’s top strategic priority.

To round out the strategy, and build a suite of cross-platform services, RIM made a few acquisitions, such as instant messaging firm LiveProfile. The service had about 15 million users and worked on Apple and Android devices, giving BBM the entrée it needed to those platforms.

But the plan deeply divided the company. BBM was still an important driver of BlackBerry sales. Making it widely available to competitors represented an added threat to RIM’s faltering handset business, led by Mr. Heins at the time. Many inside the company felt a cross-platform BBM made sense, but only when BlackBerry 10 was out. Mr. Balsillie and proponents of his plan felt that would be too late.

“It’s fair to say [the risk to handset sales] was a shared concern of everybody I spoke to,” said former RIM executive Mr. Spence. “But it was hard to deny the fact [carriers’ text messaging] revenue was declining. These carriers were looking for a solution and this was a potential solution.”

One former executive felt Mr. Balsillie was overestimating the revenue potential of his software-driven strategy. As Mr. Balsillie talked up SMS 2.0, Mr. Heins and his team increasingly cast doubt on it internally. “He was absolutely canvassing behind the scenes working to kill it,” said one company insider.

As for Mr. Lazaridis, he was supportive of launching BBM for rival operating systems, but was concerned about the costs and risks involved in building out the SMS 2.0 strategy, said a source close to the board. “We weren’t in a position to be investing in free services that required massive capital expenditure [and could provide] zero payback for maybe a few years if we’re successful,” the source said. Like others, Mr. Lazaridis worried about handset sales.

But Mr. Balsillie was increasingly convinced that SMS 2.0 was the way to go. After pitching the plan to CEOs of 12 of the largest wireless carriers in the world in late 2011, he believed he could sign up at least one major U.S. carrier â€" insiders say AT&T was interested â€" as well as Telefonica and one or two other European carriers. That’s all it would take, he felt, to convince others to adopt BBM en masse.

But other RIM executives who were part of the growing SMS 2.0 team also encountered resistance.

Mr. Balsillie was pushing to formally launch SMS 2.0 at an industry conference at the end of February, 2013. But with the company under mounting pressure to overhaul its top leadership, he and Mr. Lazaridis handed the reins to Mr. Heins in late January.

A few weeks later, Mr. Heins killed the SMS 2.0 strategy, backed by Mr. Lazaridis.

“We had to get the BlackBerry 10 out, and we couldn’t be distracted,” said a source close to the board. “Everything else was shelved. And if that meant getting rid of strategies that didn’t fit, or weren’t complete, or required resources, I think [Mr. Heins] did the right thing.”

The Globe and Mail requested interviews with Mr. Heins and with Barbara Stymiest, the chair of the board. The company declined, but agreed to agreed to provide answers to written questions.

Asked why he shelved SMS 2.0, Mr. Heins said in an e-mailed response: “There are so many [instant messaging] alternatives in the marketplace that we wanted to be careful to launch only when we felt we could clearly differentiate our offering.”

Mr. Balsillie, no longer an executive but still a board member, urged directors to reconsider, but they backed the new CEO. Mr. Balsillie couldn’t abide by the decision. He resigned from the board in late March, then sold all his stock. Few people knew the reason for his departure, including his long-time co-CEO, Mr. Lazaridis.

BlackBerry did launch a version of its BBM application last weekend for iPhones and Android devices, but simply as a stand-alone app. Andrew Bocking, the executive who oversees BBM, said that with built-in capabilities to have group chats, share photos, calendar items and other features, “it really takes BBM to a whole other level … I believe there is an opportunity for a dominant player in instant messaging and there will be one winner-take-all.”

To those who championed the SMS 2.0 strategy, most of them now gone, RIM should have been well on its way there already.

A fizzled launch

Finally, close to six years after Apple unveiled the iPhone, the long-awaited BlackBerry 10 made its debut at a glitzy launch event in January, featuring singer Alicia Keys as the company’s “global creative director.” It was a minor detail in a much larger story, but the made-up title and meaningless job irked some who wondered why the company was distracting itself with celebrity endorsements while in the fight of its life.

The Z10 device itself won a number of positive reviews. The New York Times’ David Pogue, who previously had predicted that the BlackBerry was doomed, began his review: “I’m sorry. I was wrong.” But eight months later, it’s hard to see the launch as anything other than a total business failure, given the sheer volume of unsold smartphones now written off.

The marketing campaign was confusing and vague: An ad that ran during the Super Bowl failed to explain what made the product distinct. A source close to the board said directors weren’t shown the ad before it ran, and some didn’t understand the content or the slogan, “Keep Moving.” There were no lineups, and no buzz for the product â€" nothing like the frenzy of publicity that seems to surround the launch of each new version of the iPhone.

Once again, the market had shifted, and there was little demand for the Z10 in an era where sophisticated operating systems were commonplace and phones were getting cheaper. The one advantage the BlackBerry may have had over its rivals â€" a physical keyboard â€" wasn’t present in the first model to hit the market.

“The only people still clamouring for a new smartphone from BlackBerry were in it for the keyboard,” said S&P’s Mr. Moorman. “Then they come out with a touchscreen. Anyone who wanted a touchscreen was already gone.”

As it turns out, both Mr. Balsillie and Mr. Lazaridis were proven right. It was hard enough to compete in a commoditizing smartphone market. Leading with the wrong product on top of that only made BlackBerry’s task more hopeless. Mr. Heins’s strategic errors only compounded the challenging situation he had inherited.

The product was difficult to sell for other reasons. One company insider said it could take close to an hour for young sales staff to demonstrate the product in dealer stores.

And many long-time BlackBerry users found that the new system was too different from the classic BlackBerry experience for their liking. Many of the little “moments of delight,” as they are called in the company, were forgotten or overlooked by the QNX developers who lacked ties to the company’s past. For example, users can’t hit “u” and look at the last unread message in their inbox, nor can they easily shift to the next or previous e-mail, as they could on older BlackBerrys. Pocket-dialling is a constant hazard.

Meanwhile, the company was slow to provide service to business users â€" such as helping them to transfer applications they had written for the old BlackBerry system. Software developers were left with dead-end investments after learning they would have to rewrite their apps for the new system if they wanted to remain part of the BlackBerry world. Many simply didn’t bother.

“The decisions we made over the last two years were made within the context of a volatile, competitive and ever-changing marketplace â€" and always with the goal of delivering the vital technology that our customers need,” Mr. Heins said in a written response to questions about the success of the BlackBerry 10 launch. While he called the launch “a significant accomplishment and one that involved the reinvention of our company,” he acknowledged it “did not meet our expectations.”

As for Mr. Lazaridis, he has not given up on the enterprise he founded 29 years ago.

He is still a minority shareholder in BlackBerry, and continues to be the subject of rumours he may join a group to buy out his former company.

Mr. Lazaridis declined to discuss any such plans, but it is clear he believes the BlackBerry story is not over.

“Many companies go through cycles. Intel experienced it, IBM experienced it, Apple experienced it. Our job was to reinvent ourselves, which we all believed BB10 would do,” he said.

“The fact that a Canadian company was able to compete in that space with two of the largest tech companies in the world is a big deal. People counted IBM, Apple and other companies out only to be proven wrong. I am rooting that they are wrong on BlackBerry as well.”

With reports from Tara Perkins, Omar El Akkad and Iain Marlow

--------------------------------------------------------------

AN INTERVIEW WITH CEO THORSTEN HEINS

Did you make the most of the strategic opportunities before you when you became CEO? Did you make the right choices? Are there any you would reconsider?

When I was appointed CEO in January, 2012, I knew there were challenges and opportunities for all of us at BlackBerry. We had an aging OS and no LTE product, for example. What we have created with BlackBerry 10, BES 10 and BBM is a reliable and secure foundation to enable us to continue to innovate and create new opportunities. The decisions we made over the last two years were made within the context of a volatile, competitive and ever-changing marketplace â€" and always with the goal of delivering the vital technology that our customers need and creating value for our shareholders.

How do you feel about the way things have turned out with the BlackBerry 10 launch?

We launched a new platform that delivers a new and different user experience, an experience that was engineered for people who value extreme productivity, but the downside is that there is a steeper learning curve when it comes to adopting any new technology that is disruptive, and I believe that contributed to the slower sales.

Why was BlackBerry 10 so late?

As you know, there were delays during the process, but we are proud of what our team has developed and brought to market. The integration of the new features into the platform proved to be more complex and thus more time-consuming than anticipated. The issues were not related to the quality or functionality of the features in the software, but rather the time required to manage the integration of such a large volume of code and prepare it for commercial use globally.

Has this been difficult for you personally?

This isn’t about me; this is about our employees and our customers. One of BlackBerry’s greatest strengths is its talented, committed and passionate employees. And that is why the recent reduction to the work force was particularly challenging and difficult, albeit necessary, to address our position in a maturing and more competitive industry, and to drive the company toward profitability.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Why the China plan was shelved

One of the many strategies that became a casualty of internal feuding at Research In Motion Ltd. was a confidential plan for a China-backed venture to sell the company’s wireless network systems in Asia.

In the summer of 2010, RIM’s chairwoman Barbara Stymiest and then co-chief executive officer Jim Balsillie approached the state-owned fund China Investment Corp. (CIC) with an overture to form a joint venture. According to people familiar with the discussions, Mr. Balsillie and CIC reached a preliminary understanding in 2011. Under the plan, Beijing agreed to approve RIM as the official supplier of wireless operating systems in China, one of world’s biggest and fastest growing mobile markets that was virtually closed to foreign competitors.

A new China-based company would be formed and owned by CIC, RIM and a handful of Chinese mobile phone makers. The venture would sell Chinese-made phones which, under a licensing agreement, would operate on RIM’s core software.

“Beijing was very keen to do this deal,” said one person involved in the talks.

Mr. Balsillie championed the venture as a lucrative window into the tightly controlled Chinese market. But according to insiders, RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis and a number of directors worried the plan would distract the company from its core focus on launching a new smartphone, the BlackBerry 10.

While RIM’s executives debated the China strategy internally for nearly two years, its potential Asian partners were left in the dark. “We heard nothing. The whole thing just frittered away,” said one person close to the Chinese partners.

Shortly after Thorsten Heins was appointed RIM’s CEO in 2013, the China plan was shelved. Mr. Heins declined in a statement to discuss the abandoned venture.

Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff

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Saturday, September 28, 2013

Learning To Fall Apart

Our society likes to portray obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as a cute quirk, a goofy, if irritating, eccentricity. It is not. For the person undergoing OCD experience, it is a form of mental terrorism.

This terrorism takes the form of what psychologists call ‘intrusive thoughts’ â€" unwanted, painful thoughts or images that invade one’s consciousness, triggering profound fear and anxiety. This is the ‘obsessive’ part of OCD, and it can arise in even the most mundane circumstances. Sitting here typing, for example, I sometimes feel modest pain in my fingers, and my mind kicks into gear: You’re typing too much and causing permanent damage to your hands. Feel those little irritations at the second knuckle of your left ring finger? Those are the harbingers of arthritis. This is how it starts.

All around this mental tickertape, tension begins to build â€" a tidal lift that threatens to drown me if I don’t take immediate action. It’s hard to overstate just how world-shrinkingly claustrophobic this can feel, or just how much I am tempted to do to make the feeling go away. And here’s where the terrorists make their demands. Type slower. Put your wrist guards on. Stop typing altogether. Then you won’t have to feel this way. These are the ‘compulsions’ â€" ritual behaviours meant to alleviate anxiety.

These rituals can take many forms. For some people, it’s the stuff you see on TV â€" repeatedly checking to see if the door’s locked, counting the letters in words until a particular total is reached, avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk. I’ve experienced some of this, but for me, invitations to ritualise tend to be more purely mental â€" to ruminate endlessly, to replay anxiety-producing scenarios until I find a way to view them that will dissipate my anxiety (which, of course, never happens). The common thread are the rituals, the promise that there’s something repetitive and formalised that I can do to make things feel better.

Which brings us to religion. As in OCD, ritual plays a central role in all religious traditions. That’s not to say, of course, that ritual plays exactly the same role in OCD and religion. After all, religious ritual is an enormous arena of human activity, a means of expression for nearly every human want, need, and desire. It would be way beyond hubris for me â€" a 31-year-old whose experience of religious practice is largely limited to evangelical Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism â€" to pronounce on all of that.

But I’m struck by the fact that there is common ground between my private rituals, and the rituals that religions have invented. And from my own experience, growing up in evangelical Christianity, and now practising Tibetan Buddhist rituals, I have come to understand one thing. Some rituals are designed to help us ‘keep ourselves together’. Others are designed to help us fall apart. OCD rituals are the former, and so are many religious rituals. But Buddhist meditation offers a radical alternative.

The anxiety at the heart of OCD makes visible all the implicit certainties and background assumptions that I rely on â€" and then destroys them. You can imagine the panicky floundering, the thrashing desperation â€" and, above all, the willingness to reach for anything that looks remotely like a life raft.

Which, of course, is the ritual. Just read over the essay one more time. It couldn’t hurt to check the alarm again, could it? Why not drive at precisely the speed limit for the entire trip â€" that way, you couldn’t possibly get pulled over. The ritual doesn’t necessarily come packaged as a ritual. Rather, it arrives in the form of perfectly calibrated pain medication, the oh-so-rational solution to my confusion and disarray. When I’m feeling a little groundless it promises to get me back on my feet.

In other words, the rituals of OCD offer to restore the disrupted narrative of my life, to re-create a storyline in which all of my rollicking thoughts, feelings, and emotions can be integrated, and forward motion re-established.

Our minds are not the cognitive command rooms or centralised emotion-processing headquarters that we imagine them to be

As with OCD, so with religion. Many of the great anthropologists and sociologists of religion, including Émile Durkheim and Victor Turner, have pointed out the ways in which religious rituals serve to unite communities. But many religious rituals attempt to unify the individual as well â€" to restore a sense of coherence and continuity. This can take many forms: purging oneself of immoral acts, restoring a damaged relationship with a deity, and so on. In the evangelical circles in which I grew up, great emphasis was put on ‘getting right with God’ â€" on being reborn in Christ and committing to ‘walk with Him’. Doing so was a decisive act; it earned the believer a place among the saved and entry into Heaven.

Whatever the particular form, these kinds of rituals promise that we will no longer be groundless, disintegrated. To help deliver on this promise, OCD and much religious ritual depend on the belief that there really is some kind of entity, some thing at the core of our identity. Hindus might call it atman; those raised in the West might prefer ‘soul’. Whatever one calls it, many people firmly believe that somewhere within us there’s a centre, a seat of consciousness, a mental headquarters that processes experience and makes deliberate choices about how to move through the world.

By contrast with my evangelical Christian upbringing, Buddhism suggests that this is a profound mistake â€" that when we actually look for such an entity, a stable core to our being, there is simply nothing to be found.

Unlike OCD, or the rituals of my evangelical childhood, Buddhist rituals work not because they teach us how to stay together, but because they show us how to fall apart.

Because the solid ego is a fiction, it requires constant maintenance. We are constantly filtering our experience â€" excluding information, repressing our feelings, and ignoring our deep connections with other people â€" in order to defend and perpetuate a narrow understanding of ourselves. In other words, we’re constantly deceiving ourselves about who and what we are.

Why, you might ask, would anyone engage in this kind of self-deception? The contemporary Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche said that we are afraid of what we know to be true: that when we look to the centre of our own being, we won’t find anything to hold on to. In his words, we’re afraid that we don’t exist.

According to traditional Buddhist teachings, being is marked by impermanence. Nothing â€" no experience, no thought, no feeling, no form of self-understanding, and certainly no physical body â€" lasts forever. And even when things appear, they never stand alone. Rather, they are interdependent, composed of â€" and helping to compose â€" everything else.

The Abhidharma â€" a collection of traditional texts on Buddhist psychology â€" actually goes much further, describing how our own minds are composed of five basic elements (form, feeling, perception, concept, and consciousness). In other words, our minds are not the cognitive command rooms or centralised emotion-processing headquarters that we imagine them to be. Rather, the mind is a label that refers to nothing in and of itself, much like a crowd is nothing more than the coming together and interaction of individuals.

According to Buddhist psychology, we can actually witness the truth of these claims by observing how our own minds work. Buddhist ritual and practice seeks to expose us to our own mental processes â€" to show us exactly how we create and perpetuate the illusions that keep us in such pain.

Stories are simply composed of thoughts and feelings â€" like a string of popcorn on a Christmas tree

The centre piece of Buddhist ritual and practice is, of course, meditation. There are a huge variety of meditative traditions and practices both within and beyond Buddhism, and new variations seem to appear regularly (particularly as the market for Eastern spirituality has exploded in the West). To be clear, then, I’m going to restrict my comments to traditional shamatha meditation as taught by Trungpa Rinpoche. (For the record, I’ve been a practitioner in his lineage for the past year and a half.)

In shamatha, the practitioner simply focusses on the outbreath, following it as it passes the tip of the nose and dissolves into space. Thoughts arise, of course, and when the practitioner notices that his attention has been diverted, he simply takes note and returns to the breath.

Over time, the practitioner begins to notice the sheer quantity of thoughts and feelings that his mind is generating. He sees the way that these mental phenomena have a mysterious life of their own â€" that they arise from nowhere and then disappear again. He starts to realise that it is possible to see thoughts and feelings without judging them, reacting to them, or identifying with them.

As this happens, the practitioner begins to notice some of the stories he tells himself. Some of these are big stories â€" about the kind of person he is, the ‘meaning’ of his life, and so on. Others are much smaller â€" his narrative about why he should buy this toothbrush rather than that one, for example. But in both cases he starts to see that these stories are simply composed of thoughts and feelings â€" like a string of popcorn on a Christmas tree. In other words, he sees that his stories about himself are made-up, too. (Practitioners of contemporary cognitive behavioural therapy â€" CBT â€" might find such insights familiar.)

And as he recognises this, a kind of loosening occurs. Not only does he identify less with individual thoughts and feelings, but he also begins to rely less on particular ways of understanding himself. He feels less and less need to summarise his experience, to corral his raging flood of thoughts and feelings into a stable, permanent view of who he is. And as he begins to let go of his constant grasping after solidity, a fuller sense of who he is starts to emerge.

On a two-week solitary meditation retreat last month, I found out what happens when the two types of ritual collide: my OCD, crafted to hold tight to a false self, and my Buddhist practice, designed to take it apart.

I was at Dorje Khyung Dzhong, a retreat centre in a remote area of southern Colorado. It is comprised of eight retreat cabins strewn across 400 acres of otherwise-untouched wilderness. My teacher and another member of my meditation community were also there, in cabins about a half-mile from mine. Every three days or so, I would visit my teacher for an hour. Otherwise, we were each on our own.

The first week had been focussed and intense. I opened and closed each day with a series of chants and offerings; in between, I spent long sessions in sitting and walking meditation. My mind was slowing down; there were even a few moments in between sessions when I realised that I wasn’t thinking at all, and that nothing seemed to be missing.

However, on day six, I began to notice some pain in my knees. (I’d been nursing a low-grade knee injury for months, but things had been fine over the previous several days.) I couldn’t tell whether this was OCD spinning a story about my choices and their consequences â€" I’d neglected to stretch before the painful sitting session â€" or whether the pain was ‘real’. If it was an obsession, I certainly didn’t want to give in and ritualise. On the other hand, I didn’t want to be foolhardy with my body, especially with another week of retreat to go.

At some point, the rising mental tension simply forced a choice. I traded my meditation stool for a chair, hoping that this would put less pressure on my knees.

OCD often feels like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, except that all the choices suck and all the adventures hurt

Whatever the truth of the matter, there was now a pattern in play. I had conceded some ground initially, and this made it all the easier it to concede again. I scrapped sitting meditation entirely, added more walking sessions, and introduced laying meditation.

Over the next few days, the pattern intensified. Even walking meditation ‘hurt’, so I limited myself to laying practice. I scanned my body for the faintest signs of discomfort; when I sensed the slightest twitch or twinge, my mind would flood with tension.

Even sitting at the table to eat or read became unmanageable. I constructed an elaborate contraption out of pillows and chairs, a form of improvised traction that I hoped would suspend me above my anxieties for a few minutes at a time. Just getting situated required a delicate set of bodily movements, each of which necessitated readjusting the equipment. I had built myself a prison for one.

It had become clear: my OCD rituals were preventing me from undertaking the Buddhist rituals I had come on retreat to practise. Staying had begun to feel masochistic and I left, along with my teacher.

It turned out that I was not ready for that retreat. But it did not undermine my faith in the value of meditation practice. OCD might have gotten the upper hand, but it’s been getting the upper hand for decades. It takes time to slow down and reverse such deeply entrenched patterns.

OCD often feels like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, except that all the choices suck and all the adventures hurt. However, as I’ve begun to learn through Buddhist study and ritual, those ‘choices’ are illusory, and there’s no one being hurt. In fact, there’s no one there at all. The attempt to attain pleasure or avoid pain, to stay consistent with a storyline, to ensure some kind of outcome, to be somebody â€" this is what causes so much suffering.

That’s a hard message to hear, in part because our culture places such a heavy emphasis on the construction of an integrated self with a coherent story in life.  We believe that deep down, there is some kind of solid, stable bedrock to our identity, some unshakable foundation that provides us with the capacity to control significant portions of our experience: to be who we really are, to be true to ourselves. Much religious ritual is designed to reinforce this view â€" to convince us that it’s possible to keep ourselves together, and to provide a method that promises to help us do so. And while there are important differences, OCD and its rituals are built on a similar worldview.

But that worldview isn’t true. It isn’t possible to keep ourselves together, because we aren’t one coherent thing. Instead, we are a kind of flux, a series of patterns and surprises, inextricably interwoven into the larger field of phenomena that we call reality. Which means that we can’t really let ourselves fall apart either, because we were never together in first place. What we can do, though, is recognise these truths and learn to be at peace with them.

Of course, it’s one thing to talk or write about these things. It’s another entirely to know them in your body, at the level of instinct. And here, according to Buddhism, is where meditation practice is essential. By sitting alone with ourselves, and by seeing what our minds are always doing, we begin to rediscover space, to remember that it’s possible to step off the conveyor belt and watch it go by.

Published on 27 September 2013

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