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The Complete History of RIM
museumpeace writes "I enjoyed reading Alex Frankel's thorough Tech. Review article on the luck, persistence and shrewdness that took RIM's proprietary mobile e-mail technology from presumed small niche product to the must-have blackberry that so many use today. Although the technology at the heart of the product was developed in 1989, it took years of further development, the lucky break of GPRS supplanting Mobitex, and the business smarts to jump on their first-mover advantage and the daring to partner with giant Nokia who could have swallowed RIM. Its a great example of how to succeed by carefully making a defacto standard out of a good proprietary technology."
In the early 90's, I talked with RIM about potential employment. They had a low speed external modem using Mobitex (I think) that would hook to your serial port.
They didn't have the "killer app" for it at the time, but were very much in the mode of "let's be smart and figure out a good application for this technology." While that approach can often be puttnig the cart before the horse, they persisted, and it obviously paid off, hitting the sweet spot of using the lower speed bandwidth for the two-way pager-like always-on-but-not-quite-fully-online BlackBerry.
It really is a rare and excellent example of finding the right killer app for a given (and flexible, but seeming limited) technology. Having the technical wherewithal to put that in a small pager-like device (several years ago), obviously shows some real technical talents in their company, too.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
There is good reason why the email client in Windows Mobile 5.0 will not kill off the BlackBerry. RIM has done a great job taking advantage of the network infrastructure. Now if they could just make a device with enough power to run a real application this thing could really take off.
Adventure City Tours
Maybe it would have been popular with the tech people if it had been more convergent rather than a narrow proprietary gadget. There were millions of laptops out there and millions of cell phones. Nobody could make them work together except perhaps some tech heads who happened to notice they both had IR ports. Why is that? Why do we have another technolgy taking off that doesn't work with other stuff?
"...and yet, I blame society" Duke - Repo Man
Blackberry is used by so many? just recently on slashdot was the first time I and many had heard of it.
Blackberry has not been sold to geeks - it has primary sold to executives and traditional professionals like doctors and lawyers. It's on the radar for geeks because RIM is selling the hell out of Enterprise Servers - which get stuck in the data center.
Personally, I've owned treos, PocketPC phones, and even kyocera smartphones. Nothing comes close to the user experience with BlackBerry - but they could certainly use an open source software community, somehting that isn't going to happen until RIM changes their SDK and application signing terms. I'd go nuts writing software in my spare time if RIM would make it so it doesn't cost me more than I would plan on making off the whole thing (a couple hundred bucks)... I suspect I'm not the only one who isn't coding on the principle of the $200 application signing fee...
-- $G
To be fair, I think that any of the qwerty keyboards on mobile devices take some getting used to. Having only spent a few minutes in the store with a blackberry, I would way that its keyboard is horrid to type on.
Then again, I had the same impression of the Treo keyboard until I had spent a few days with it. After a few months, I'm pretty much at the "touch typing" point on the Treo. I'm reasonably fast, and only need to look at the keyboard for puncuation.
As for the blackberry being the best on the market right now, that's rather dependant on the users situation.
The Treo allows me to access my work e-mail and gmail accounts with NO changes on the server side, and can also take advantage of all of the third-party Palm apps out there. The blackberry would have required an investment of time and money on the server side to use properly, and the selection of third party apps isn't nearly as broad. These factors made the Treo the hands-down winner for me.
One word of advice for anyone considering mobile e-mail on ANY device: Make sure your spam filters on the server side are up to snuff. If 200 spams are annoying to sort through on your desktop, believe me, it's MUCH worse on a mobile device. MUCH worse.