I can read this well enough”—because he was from the Netherlands—“that we
could probably get this stuff to work.” We spent the next few hours hooking
everything up, and we surprised them because we got it working.
We got the contract and started writing software to make it all work, and the
rest was history. We wrote most of the very first wireless protocol software,
application programming interface (API), the development tools—all the early
stuff for the first wireless data networks.
That was our first break. That was our first chance to break out of a consulting
role and really start producing products.
Livingston: Would you say this was one of the biggest turning points for RIM?
Lazaridis: I would say it was the beginning of a turning point. No one knew
what wireless data was. You couldn’t go in and apply for loans to do wireless
data. It was bizarre. Cell phones were just happening—you started seeing
lawyers and real estate agents with cell phones. When you started talking about
wireless data, no one knew what you were talking about. Think about it; there
were no computers in people’s homes at the time. It was a very rare occurrence
to see a computer in somebody’s home. They weren’t dialing in to the Internet.
Everything back then was very specific. It was proprietary; you were dialing in
to servers. So it was a different world than it is today.
Livingston: If you were doing things that were so ahead of their time, how were
you so successful?
Lazaridis: The tricky part was, how do you intercept a market trend? How do
you intercept an industrial trend? How do you package what you’ve learned and
what’s happening in the technology space so that it has new value to customers?
How do you find those customers?
What we learned with Mobitex and later Datatech was that there were
some really interesting applications that were being developed, and we
were right there while it was happening. But it took a lot of faith. You call it
vision, but it’s a combination of vision and faith that 1) it’s going to happen
someday, and 2) it has value, and 3) you can actually accomplish it in an economic
way and promote it so that you can fund the development and growth of
the business. That’s pretty tricky stuff.
Livingston: Can you tell me about any of the other major turning points?
Lazaridis: One of the dreams that I had all through high school was to build
some kind of space-based technology. You have these visions when you are
young of working for NASA and building a space probe or part of a spaceship.