The fate of Research in Motion rests on the success or failure of BlackBerry 10.
(Credit: Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)
LAS VEGAS--Alec Saunders needed a little bait.
Soon after Saunders took over the developer relations team, he asked Research In Motion's then co-CEO Mike Lazaridis in October 2011 for 25,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets. When Lazaridis asked why, Saunders said he intended to give them away.
"His jaw just dropped to the floor," Saunders told CNET. "He stood there flabbergasted."
Lazaridis ultimately agreed, and Saunders began giving PlayBooks out to developers. He followed that up by giving away more than 8,000 units of RIM's Dev Alpha devices, which ran an early version of BlackBerry 10.
Saunders knew he needed to get the long-ignored BlackBerry developer base excited again. In 48 out of the last 52 weeks, he has been on a plane circling the globe in an effort to drum up interest in every corner. Combine the mileage he and his team of nearly 100 evangelists have logged for RIM, and there would be enough to travel to the moon and back five times over, or 2.5 million miles.
"I took December off and took the time to get to know my wife," he quipped.
Saunders has embraced a concept that RIM had long ignored: that developers and a healthy app "ecosystem" can make or break an operating system. He's tried to make it more accommodating and responsiv... [Read more]
by Roger Cheng via CNET
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