BlackBerry Thumbs a Ride With Home Users

Tyler Lessard grips his BlackBerry in a familiar pose, head bent as he focuses on the screen with fingers punching madly. But it isn't E-mail forcing him into a bow sometimes called the "BlackBerry Prayer." An executive at the device's Canadian manufacturer, Research in Motion, Lessard is demonstrating a new side to the ultimate corporate communicator. He's playing Guitar Hero III.
His performance is ok, although unlikely to remind anyone of Jimi Hendrix or Slash—or even infomercial guitar god Esteban. But prowess isn't the point. It's that the game even exists, says Lessard, who works with outside software developers. RIM even promoted Guitar Hero on the BlackBerry home page, which for years kept a staid, corporate tone. "I hope that's a sign of things to come here," he says.

Nearly a decade after unleashing E-mail from PCs, the BlackBerry is breaking free of its own corporate constraints. RIM essentially created the market for wireless E-mail with its private, enterprise-oriented network. Its BlackBerry also embraced other productive pursuits: basics like calendars, address books, and documents and sophisticated software for specialized tasks like dispatching sales, support, and other mobile forces. Along the way, RIM wrapped in a phone to make BlackBerry the most successful smartphone in North America.

Now the company is targeting individual business users and even homebody consumers. Sleeker, more stylish BlackBerry Curve and Pearl models even come with cameras, games, and social networking. They helped push its subscriber list to a record 14 million at the end of February, up from 8 million a year earlier. RIM added 2 million subscribers in the most recent quarter alone—about half were individual buyers. Total sales doubled last year to $6 billion and likewise profits to $1.3 billion. As interest in smartphones accelerated, RIM's stock doubled in value each of the past two years.

Gaudy numbers like those draw competitors. Microsoft's longtime effort to get Windows Mobile onto cellphones has gained traction in the corporate market that RIM has ruled. Nokia already dominates smartphones in Europe and Asia and is eyeing a bigger role here. Consumers are expected to flock to upcoming phones with the Google-backed Android system, much as they did to Apple's stylish and multimedia friendly iPhone. "For years, there was clearly a distance between RIM and competitors," says Ken Dulaney, who tracks smartphones for Gartner, a market research firm. "That's no longer the case."

Rising tide. Executives appear unconcerned at RIM's corporate headquarters, which is less a campus than a scattering of nearly two dozen buildings across Waterloo, Ontario, a college town about an hour west of Toronto. If anything, RIM seems to be benefiting from competitors' success, argues Mike Lazaridis, RIM's founder and co-CEO. Apple is spending tremendously to market the iPhone, he says. That's raising awareness that a handset can do much more than the mainstream "feature phones" that most consumers carry. "People are walking into stores with a feature phone and out with a smartphone," he says.

The worldwide smartphone market grew roughly 50 percent in 2007 to about 122 million units, according to data from Gartner. That's still only about 1 in 10 of all cellphones sold, suggesting lots of upside.

"The opportunity for smartphones is virtually unbounded," says John Traynor, senior director of mobile communications at Microsoft. And while the three big players in North America—Apple, Microsoft, and RIM—compete fiercely, they aren't forced yet to just steal each other's customers. "The day will come when the market is saturated. We're nowhere near that yet," says Jeff Bradley, a senior vice president at AT&T, famously the exclusive carrier for the iPhone but also a leading seller of BlackBerry and Windows handsets.

AT&T and other wireless carriers love smartphones, which typically handle E-mail and more sophisticated functions than mainstream phones. That translates to higher carrier revenue from data plans, a trend that should accelerate as the handsets absorb more functions. Smartphones have become "voraciously convergent," consuming every portable in sight, says Avi Greengart, who tracks wireless handsets for Current Analysis. "The PDA? That's gone already," he says. "GPS navigator, you're next. mp3 player, we've got you in our sights." And hand-held game consoles are just behind.
Not that RIM execs would predict the BlackBerry will become the gaming platform of choice. While the company reaches for more consumers, RIM's personality remains tightly wed to its corporate roots. Lazaridis's comments repeatedly return to basics, including security and reliability—of a "stress free" day for users. He talks of engineering, design, and science and of trade-offs between features like big, sexy touch-screens and drained batteries. "There is a massive set of paradoxes that must be dealt with," he says.

Similarly, the RIM complex almost hums with sober seriousness. The company has been in business for 24 years; it was coincidental that BlackBerry launched amid the Internet bubble. No ping-pong tables or lava lamps of dot-com upstarts at RIM's buildings, despite most of them abutting a university.

That's the University of Waterloo, which Lazaridis, 47, left a month before graduating to found RIM. As an undergrad, he'd won a lucrative contract from General Motors for an early wireless technology. RIM eventually moved into paging. From there, Lazaridis could see that hand-helds would become something more complex. The gamble was if the technology was ready.

RIM chose to make sure by building an end-to-end system, a private network that links every BlackBerry to operations centers whose exact locations are treated as corporate secrets. They control the flow of data between corporate servers, such as those that handle a company's E-mail, and the 350 wireless networks on which BlackBerry operates. "It's why your BlackBerry just works when you step off a plane anywhere," Lazaridis says. It's also why RIM's service can fail, as it has in occasional, hours-long outages. RIM executives say they understand and are investing to minimize outages. "I get it. I get it," says co-CEO Jim Balsillie.

But the hiccups have helped competitors, particularly Microsoft, which has taken dead aim at RIM's corporate clients. "Routing data through a single point also makes it a single point of failure," says Microsoft's Traynor. Even Apple, whose iPhone was originally a consumer product, is targeting corporations by improving security. RIM, in turn, is said to be developing a touch-screen model to compete for customers drawn by the iPhone's big monitor and slick software.

Analysts say RIM needs new models to appeal to consumers, moving beyond its versions with a full qwerty keyboard and the Pearl's traditional keypad. RIM has proved an innovative company that's willing to do the unexpected, says Gartner's Dulaney. The company successfully moved from its hugely popular trackwheel to a trackball, which is better for Web surfing. Stay tuned for more handset changes, adds Balsillie at RIM: "There is no religion to what we do in packaging." The genuflecting instead is left to reliability and security, which RIM execs hope will be as important to consumers as to corporations. They think those basics will keep new customers bowing, with equal fervor and serenity, to new generations of BlackBerrys.

Entrepreneurs Make Money and Lead Happy Lives

Entrepreneurship is often seen not just as an approach to business but as a way of life. In the process of writing Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives, Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek interviewed 55 successful entrepreneurs from a variety of industries, both for-profit and nonprofit.
U.S. News spoke with Vanourek, who has run a consulting firm and worked in the education sector, about how there's competitive—and personal—advantage to be gained from pursuing entrepreneurship as a way of life. Excerpts:

In your book, you define entrepreneurship as something more than just starting your own business.
I think a lot of people confuse owning a small business with entrepreneurship. They are closely related but not exactly the same thing. Most definitions of entrepreneurship include this notion of innovation. It's possible for a small-business owner to take the existing model and do the same thing. Innovation and entrepreneurship really go hand in hand. You can't be entrepreneurial without being innovative.

We define the entrepreneurial way as opportunity recognition, innovation, and action. A lifelong entrepreneur is creating a life of significance through opportunity recognition, innovation, and action.

You don't have to be a business entrepreneur or social entrepreneur to be a life entrepreneur. You can live your life in an entrepreneurial way and work for corporate America, or be a small-business owner who we wouldn't think of as entrepreneurial in the pure sense.

How can someone be a "life entrepreneur"?
Part of that is just being innovative and recognizing opportunities in your whole life. There's a guy we interviewed named Max Israel. One of the things he builds into his professional life is his own "secret office." He builds [into his schedule] 25 work days out of the year to go out into the woods and go canoeing and adventure biking, that sort of thing. He has fun, but he also has his best ideas there. So he's building his quality of life into his annual professional calendar in a way that's restoring and renewing.

Do people really want to incorporate entrepreneurship into their daily life? Many people prefer to keep work separate from the rest of their lives.
What we're not talking about is having your work life so pervasive that it consumes your whole life. We believe your professional life should be challenging and exciting, a dynamic part of your whole life, but it's only a part. The key is to integrate your personal and professional life. What we mean is being the same person in your personal life that you are at work. We [write in the book] about having a strong personal foundation and core identity—knowing what your values are, what your strengths and passions are, and bringing those to bear in your work, and your personal life, so that you're the same person across all of those different roles.

A lot of people get caught in the trap that "I'm the CEO, or I'm the marketing professional, or I'm the HR person, and I bring this persona to work, but I leave it behind when I go home." They don't bring their sense of humor or values or personal characteristics to their work, and there's a real danger there.

What's the danger?
You become this self-important executive, and you feel that your whole identity is wrapped up in the success of the initiative. A lot of people end up cutting corners because their identity is so wrapped up in the bottom-line numbers.

What's an example of someone integrating their work and personal life?
One of the best examples is Gary Erickson, the founder of Clif Bar. When he started Clif Bar, he was this young kid who was interested in three things: One was jazz, two was adventure sports, and three was organic, healthy food. He had the vision to start a company to make organic, healthy energy bars. He integrated those passions into his approach and the way the company is run. The company has a very exciting, dynamic culture—they have weekly jam sessions in a company theater to bring that jazz aspect forward. They have community service programs and company wellness programs where people get paid time off to use the company's personal trainers to exercise. They give back some of their profits to the community. He's created this company that reflects who he really is. He allows other people who share those values to have a fun, interesting job where they can also make a contribution.