RIPE PICKINGS IN BLACKBERRY SEASON.

This article presents an interview with Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of Ontario's Research in Motion. Balsillie has run the 20-year old Ontario company for 12 years, and recently announced better-than-expected earnings, thanks to sales that surged 158% last quarter. Back in 2000, says Balsillie, it wasn't that people didn't want to buy BlackBerries, it was that when they bought them, they didn't work very well. By early 2003, they started to say, "This is working well now." Research in Motion and Palm, once bitter rivals, are working together now, due to a shift in strategy. Palm moved out of the application space and Research in Motion had a strategy of wanting to work with all the handset vendors. In the next five years, Balsillie predicts that companies will be doing a broad array of phone strategies. He sees an almost infinite portfolio of device-packaging possibilities and contends that Research in Motion is going to make sure that the middleware connects to all the different networks, e-mail environments, and countries.