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 and the growth and decline of a technology company. In the world of telecom companies – the telecom companies do very similar things however the suppliers tend to be different. This was the case which allowed Blackberry to grow, their built a wonderful handset which offer secure emails to people, and in a world where privacy is still important, having secure emails is a great thing to offer. The supplier was BellSouth who was competing against the other telecoms. If they had the hot technology people would be sign up as subscribers and the company would operate similar to a utility. People tend to have few choices to their provider so switching is less an option particularly if the provider has the hot technology. This leads the suppliers in a tough position – every year companies more or less have to come up with something new and this new should be the hot item in the field. That is a huge challenge and for 15 years the engineers at Blackberry did that but since engineers are people; events and lives change sometimes for the better and sometimes to make them run on the same spot while others in the field are running in the distance.

Part of the success of Blackberry was for many years the two founders functioned great as partners – one looked after sales and finance; the other looked after the engineering. The sales person always promised the moon in new things and the engineered delivered. The abilities of the two to be co-Chairs with a President who could balance the two off and understand what directions the company needed to go was one of the companies secret to success. The engineer and his group did wonders in correctly anticipating where the market was going and meeting the needs of the telecoms. When the telecoms were interested in advanced technology for the time and the engineering group asked why? they started to look at other alternative companies who would provide the devices the company needed to compete in the marketplace. Loyalty was not forever but it would allow for time overruns.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, one of the reasons to read the book is to look at why the company can down as fast as it did. One year it was worth 100s of billions next year tens of billions, still a large successful company just not as large as it once was when it dominated the smart phone market. When you invest in companies such as Blackberry you need to know what triggers and what is hot and not and be ready to switch to alternatives in the market place when those triggers can be noticed. Otherwise one year your stocks are worth 100s of dollars the next year they are worth 10s of dollars.

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