Losing the Signal with the subtitle of the book is the spectacular rise and fall of Blackberry by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff  published by HarperCollins, Toronto, 2015 is the terrific story of the smart phone. If you look around more and more people have smartphones as opposed to basic cell phones and there are many advantages to this. One of the first smartphones was the Blackberry and being the first on the technical side there were many hurdles to pass through. The combination of brilliant problem solving engineer and a hard-driving sales president  – Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie respectively, built a great company, however in the ever-changing world of smartphones the company is not the leader it once was. The story of Blackberry is the story of an engineer who figured out how to put wireless communications and computers together is to build something special. The something special proved to a Blackberry which allowed a person to read their emails away from their computer on a secure platform. This lead to sending more emails than telephone calls. Along this journey is the invention – trying to keep the device reasonably simple; the selling of it and all the infrastructure to ensure the system works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The sexy part of technology is the device or program; the non sexy part of business is selling the technology to receive income streams. After Blackberry was being used and sold, it than began to be concerned over receiving the income stream or money from people using their devices. The stock would go up on the greater sales, it would fall when those sales were not regularly captured by users paying for the system – or bad operations. Big companies do the operations side well; small companies do not because it is the non sexy part of the business. As a company grows it has to balance these elements of the company out or be sold to a bidder willing to pay for the technology. The sexy part of the smart phone business is the continual advancements – figuring out what a consumer is willing to pay for. For many years, Blackberry was the secure emails; however as time went by and telecom companies spent billions to upgrade their infrastructure, the advantage is no longer an advantage. Apple made the Mac portable in the iPhone; the iPhone came with applications or apps for people to use; there is now considerable advantages to having an iPhone. Blackberry is still in business just following a different path.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, while successful tech companies generate billions of dollars because of their age they often do not pay dividends. As the company gains years of service, then it is inclined to offer dividends which are secured by their large cash balances. As younger companies tech stocks are growth stocks and with growth stocks the manta is what have you done for me lately? or why is the latest technology the best and brightest, given the immense alternatives that are offered in the marketplace. Understanding the complexities of the how and where the companies compete is part of the investors homework. If you are interested you world is a bigger place, if not focus on other companies where the benchmarks of understanding are easier and the rewards can be as lucrative.

There are more question than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.