Meeting our Waterloo

Everything you watch on TV these days seems to be sponsored by BlackBerry. Whether it’s Major League Baseball or Glee, Torch and BlackBerry Messenger are well and widely touted. The run-up to Christmas is, of course, a major time for retail sales, BlackBerry included, so promotional activity peaks.

All this activity is just as well. BlackBerry is losing its ranking as top dog in North American smartphone sales. Although BlackBerry remains number one in sales by an individual brand, recent market share figures show it has been eclipsed by Android when you take into account all of Android’s iterations.

To top it all off, The Globe and Mail this morning ran a story saying that Research In Motion is ripe for the picking. With a market cap of “only” $24.2 billion the company is increasingly affordable as a takeover target by Apple, Google, or Microsoft, according to the article.

With all the brouhaha over Potash Corp. falling into foreign hands, surely Canadians and their governments would not allow any such grab for RIM to go through. Selling off our natural resources (potash, nickel or petroleum) is bad enough, but worse would be to permit the takeover of that far more important natural resource, people, in particular the 8,000 employed by RIM in Waterloo out of a global workforce of more than 12,000. If such a takeover is launched and not stopped, Canadian entrepreneurs and workers will rightfully feel abandoned.