For Balsillie it's all about keeping up with cool

The insult has been all but forgotten now except by those with very long memories. But there was a time when those who were impatient with the sluggish progress of a technology startup from Waterloo would simply call it by its derogatory nickname: Research In Slow Motion.

No one would use the word "slow" any more to describe RIM or its hyperactive boss, Jim Balsillie. A lot of other four-letter words, yes - NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, insert your own choices here - but not that one. Mr. Balsillie is about as slow as a hurricane's winds and, to those who value peace, quiet and Following the Rules, every bit as destructive.

In the past 12 months, he has aimed an arrow at Apple, pulled an end-run around the pro hockey establishment, launched a hostile takeover, paid (along with two colleagues) an unprecedented fine to clean up an old stock-options scandal, unleashed a blistering attack on a bankrupt Nortel Networks and - oh, by the way - created a political headache for the Harper government. All in a year's work for Category 5 Jim.

Even coming from someone as tightly wound as Mr. Balsillie, though, this week's assault on Nortel was a surprise. Who knew that RIM was so interested in picking away at the carcass of a failed tech giant? After picking their jaws off the floor, some financial analysts decided, yes, it makes some sense. The price is right. The company says it's willing to pay up to $1.1-billion (U.S.) to get a decent wireless-networking business and some key patents from Nortel - that's not even a month's worth of revenue for RIM now. So, what explains the combative style?

In entering the Nortel yard sale, Nokia and Ericsson placed their bids according to the rules of the bankruptcy court. Not RIM. It wouldn't sign a confidentiality deal. It didn't bid by the deadline. Instead it issued a press release that claimed Nortel has "blocked [RIM]at every turn" and in which Mr. Balsillie fairly pleaded with Ottawa to keep the dastardly Nordic brutes away.

(Partly in the interest of "national security," of course, because who knows how much damage the Swedes could wreak if they got their war-mongering fingers on, um, Canadian wireless software?) This isn't the behaviour of an established and fabulously successful company, which RIM is. This is how underdogs act. Since it's so similar to how his play for the Phoenix Coyotes unfolded it's tempting to assume the man just doesn't know any other method of doing business. But there's more to it than that. If Jim Balsillie acts like he thinks everyone's out to get him - well, maybe that's because everyone is.

For a long time, RIM could ride its technological edge. It had sliced through the Gordian knot of how to make wireless e-mail work better than anyone else. Microsoft couldn't match it. Nobody could. That's why among corporate and government users, the BlackBerry still dominates - which is key, because that's where the juiciest profits are.

Not every investor realizes that RIM, unlike other smart-phone makers, doesn't merely get revenue from selling devices but also takes a monthly cut from the phone carriers. For business customers, that's typically $6 to $8 a month per account, according to BMO Nesbitt Burns. It's a lovely business, so lovely that all the other handset makers would like to have it, too.

The good news for RIM is that the BlackBerry still holds a clear advantage in wireless e-mail.(If there was any doubt, RIM's most famous customer confirmed its superiority this January: Barack Obama didn't have to argue with security over whether he could keep his iPhone, did he?) But the trouble is that the technological gap is closing. E-mail's old hat; now it's all about Twitter and mobile Web surfing and music and touch screens - about reaching the mass consumer. RIM does these things well, but so do others. It still commands a larger piece of the world's smart-phone market (17 per cent last year, says BMO) than Apple, but the latter went from zero to 10 per cent in two years with the iPhone and is unlikely to stop there.

In the long run, the big question for RIM is how to compete in the consumer market without blowing its brains out on advertising. Sure, signing up Bono is nice. But the Apple brand is ubiquitous. Every middle-class teenager in civilization has already used an Apple product by the time she's old enough to sign her first cellphone contract.

Mr. Balsillie has been around long enough to know how quickly things can go south for tech companies that can't keep up with cool. A decade ago, as RIM was introducing its first wireless e-mail pager, one of the hot gadgets was the PalmPilot handheld organizer. In 2000, Palm went public and instantly became a $50-billion company.

Within a couple of years, the stock had lost almost all of its value; more recently, Palm has operated on the knife-edge of serious financial trouble. (Only the launch of the Palm Pre - a serious rival to the iPhone and the BlackBerry - has revived its prospects.) Even Apple spent many years in the wilderness. Few businesses are as capricious as technology.

Would buying some Nortel technology and patents insulate RIM from becoming another fallen tech star? No. But they might help. And anyway, if you're a RIM shareholder, don't you want a CEO's who's obsessive about not falling behind? From the outside, Jim Balsillie's behaviour sometimes seems extreme, aggressive, even paranoid. But that may be exactly what RIM needs, even now.