impacted things like battery life.
Livingston: Back in 1997, was it hard to convince people that they should want
to travel with email access?
Lazaridis: The key thing to remember was that email was not a new idea for
anyone that went to school in the early ’80s. But industry was rather slow to
adopt it. Not because of anything with industry, but because the technology just
hadn’t reached the kind of ubiquity that it needed. It had to reach a certain critical
mass so that there was somebody to send it to....

What was interesting was how we named it, because it goes back to our
research roots. We decided to do it very scientifically. We went out and found
one of the leading naming companies at the time, called Lexicon, and we
worked with them for 6 months to come up with the name. It was probably the
most expensive word I ever bought.
BlackBerry ended up being one of the all-time most famous brands worldwide.
It works everywhere. We tested it around the world. It was one of
40 names that were on...

It was a 3- to 4-year investment we started making with students early on
because I knew their value. We treated them like full-time employees. We’re
the largest co-op employer in Canada.