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. "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 responsive to developers. It's the touchy feely stuff RIM execs never thought was important.
"Development sentiment is crucial," he said. "Developer interest is a leading indicator of success for any platform."
There's a lot riding on BlackBerry 10, which after a series of delays is expected to be unveiled on Wednesday in New York. Having had no significant new product in more than a year, RIM needs a hit. Badly. Simply put, the BlackBerry operating system is in free fall. In the third quarter, the BlackBerry OS accounted for 5.3 percent of the market, a tick above Samsung Electronics' homegrown Bada OS (little more than a glorified experiment for the Korean handset giant), and less than half the 11 percent share it held a year ago, according to a Gartner study. In the same period, Android's market share surged to 72.4 percent from 52.5 percent a year ago.
Now RIM has has to win back consumers who have long abandoned their BlackBerrys for iPhones and Android devices. It's planning a media blitz, complete with Super Bowl commercial. At the same time, BlackBerry has to compete against another upstart mobile operating system, Windows Phone by Microsoft, which is also seeking to be the No. 3 platform behind Google's Android and Apple's iOS.
Indeed, RIM has a long, tough road ahead of it, but credit Saunders for connecting with the developer community. When the operating system is unveiled, it will have 70,000 applications, which the company boasts is the most apps for a mobile platform at launch. Android had a little more than 50 apps at launch, but that was before the explosion of app development.
"I can't describe what (Saunders) achieved in one and a half years," CEO Thorsten Heins said in a recent interview. "I can't speak highly enough of him."
Of course, RIM will be going up against two ecosystems with an entrenched following. Apple, for instance, boasts of more than three-quarters of a million apps for iOS, while Android has more than 700,000 apps in the market. The Windows Phone Store has 125,000 apps, having doubled in size after the launch of Windows Phone 8 late last year.
Fresh start
Rojo is a small, dark, and smoke-filled bar awash in red-neon accent lighting. A downed air-conditioning system meant a stiflingly hot environment, despite the windy and cold weather outside. It looked like hell, and that night, it felt like it too.
When I finally met up with Saunders and his entourage, which included a few public relations representatives and another developer evangelist, Tom Anderson, the heat in the bar forced us out to the minimalist and slate-dominated lobby for our sit-down chat.
Saunders wore a black suit jacket, button-down shirt, and blue jeans, and had just come in from a flight from Ottawa, Canada.
Saunders, a family man who leads a scout troop in his off hours, can't help but to come off as a nice, normal guy. He spoke in a calm and even tone with a slight Canadian accent. But his jovial and seemingly laid-back manner gave way to enthusiasm when talking about RIM's developer efforts.
"We're building a good head of steam behind us," he said. "Good things are happening."
Saunders had roots at RIM even before he joined the company in June 2011. He had previously worked at QNX before leaving to run his own start-up, a Web conferencing provider called iotum. QNX was eventually bought by RIM in April 2010, and its software forms the foundation for BlackBerry 10.
So it was a homecoming of sorts for Saunders when he joined RIM, right about when its market share started to collapse.
"It seemed like a good challenge to me," he said.
He made it clear he was a different sort of RIM exec. At one of his first public outings as vice president of developer relations, Saunders made the highly unusual move of posting his e-mail address while on stage at one of the company's many developer conferences.
"That was huge," said Jeremy Wall, a part-time BlackBerry developer who was in attendance at that conference and dabbled with the platform for the past decade. He, like everyone else in attendance, immediately grabbed his phone to update his contact list.
The result: a flood of e-mail that occupies a good chunk of Saunders' time. He received 14,793 e-mails -- in the last quarter alone. More recently, he's also taken to Twitter to answer questions, where he tweets under the user name @asaunders.
"My wife wasn't too happy with me".
Fixing a broken system
The old RIM wasn't exactly friendly to developers. From complications signing up to fragmentation in the different versions of the BlackBerry operating system, creating an app for the platform could be a nightmare. One developer politely called it "rough," and said the company previously had the tendency to drop or ignore questions or concerns.
At the same time, iOS was beginning to generate interest from app developers. RIM executives, meanwhile, clung to the idea that e-mail and security were more important to users.
"Sometimes a good (butt)-whoopin' is what you need," said Michael Nowlin, who works for a cable set-top box manufacturing company but is an enthusiast and part-time developer known as "BlackBerry Hank."
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