impacted things like...
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 we realized was that, in 1997 and before, there was a paging culture in
North America. (These networks were fundamentally North American.) We
decided to build a very advanced pager. It looked like a pager; it was the size of
a pager; it even seemed to operate like a pager. Except that it was a full-blown
two-way email terminal. It took a lot of back-end processing to make that work.
Something that a lot of people don’t realize is that the BlackBerry product is a
system, and the email posting and reception is actually done by a server. We
spent a lot of time getting it right, knowing that the market was not ready for it.
We disguised what later became the BlackBerry as a pager.
Livingston: Because people knew what a pager was, they could say, “Hey, I
need one of those”?
Mike Lazaridis 149
Lazaridis: That’s right. We gave them the opportunity to go two-way, so that
they could send a message as well as receive it. That people found very valuable.
But the system was expensive—the monthly fee was expensive, because it
was brand new; it was embryonic. But we knew that email was catching on.
We had email at RIM as soon as we started the company. We had email on
our business cards back when other business cards had telex numbers on them.
Every time I gave out my card, people would ask me, “What’s an email
address?” It wasn’t until about 5 years later that we started to converge on
something called a fax number. It wasn’t until 15 years after university that you
really started to see people adopting email in the Fortune 1000 in a big way. So
in 1999, we knew the time was right, and we had done a lot of research to make
sure we were launching at the right time.
We decided to launch it in New York, in the financial markets, because they
were big users of systems and email. They were also affluent, so they could
afford the service early on. They were big users of data and information, and
they needed it in real time. To them, time was money in a big way. The
BlackBerry system gave them that in spades.
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