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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."
They could find a better name for it.
All this talk of mobile RIMming and Nokia swallowing RIM just sounds a bit icky.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
The explosion of RIM jobs and how it lead to an increase of black berries...
What about Nokia?
I know M$ is bad and GNU/Linux good beyond that I get a cluster headache.
In November 2002, Research in Motion (RIM) and Nokia announced a licensing arrangement allowing Nokia to offer its customers the ability to receive e-mail using RIM's BlackBerry software. The news perplexed industry watchers. For the three years before the deal, only RIM's devices could connect with the company's enterprise server, so that RIM owned both parts of the market for wireless e-mail: the devices and their software. RIM, in fact, seemed to own the very notion of that market.
The BlackBerry was the hardware equivalent of a killer app, the now overused term popularized in the 1980s to describe a piece of software so attractive to users that they feel they cannot be without it. Every new technology needs a killer app to establish its acceptance; for wireless e-mail, the BlackBerry filled that need. As businesses started to deploy the device to an increasingly mobile--and pressed--workforce, BlackBerry emerged as a critical tool for businesspeople.
Why, then, would RIM make its proprietary software available to others? Why would the company partner with a massive competitive threat such as Nokia? To many observers outside RIM, these decisions signaled a major shift in the company's business model. But to those inside RIM, they stemmed from a strategy the company had always followed.
RIM's case highlights a business problem that countless technology companies have had to deal with: when a company creates a revolutionary product whose software becomes critical to the establishment of a market, it has to figure out whether to keep its software all to itself or license it in an effort to make its technology the industry standard.
RIM has, throughout its history, followed two imperatives: make the best possible proprietary device for wireless e-mail and follow whatever course will increase the size of that market. Started in 1984 as a firm that built electronic devices for other companies, RIM signed its first deal with General Motors, to deliver a networked display system that scrolled words across LED signs in GM factories. The idea behind what eventually became the BlackBerry system dates to 1989, when RIM worked on an outsourced project for Ericsson. As RIM focused more on wireless data, it started manufacturing its own devices. Pager companies like Motorola had tried to combine e-mail with pagers, but none of the devices achieved much success. By the early 1990s, even PC-based e-mail had yet to take off, and many in the telecommunications industry saw wireless e-mail as a product that people did not really want or need.
RIM proved the viability of this market in stages. First, it received an order in 1997 from BellSouth for $50 million worth of wireless e-mail devices. BellSouth was offering a pioneering service intended to allow data transmission in applications like inventory tracking for rail transport. Its so-called Mobitex network used Ericsson technology, but it still needed a supplier to build a hardware component for consumer use. The opportunity gave Research in Motion a critical test network for its device.
The opportunity also convinced RIM that it ought to seek out a larger market for its new device, known within the company as PocketLink. In 1998, RIM began working with a California-based branding agency called Lexicon. One Lexicon strategist thought the gadget's keyboard resembled the seeds of a berry; the BlackBerry launched in January 1999. Instead of employing a stylus and handwriting recognition software, the device used a small, thumb-operated qwerty keyboard. But as impressive as its physical design was, the truly remarkable thing about the BlackBerry was that RIM provided everything needed to make it work: the device itself, the software that made it run, the servers that routed e-mail from the wired network, and the airtime that RIM leased from mobile-phone carriers. "As first mover in the market, we had an opportunity to build a brand around a new category," said Dave Werezak, vice president of RIM's Enterprise Business Unit.
By mid-1999
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.
I thought that we were shunning this approach at standards wrangling? Whenever MS or Sony tries this we are against it what is different this time?
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
In the federal government, it's about the only approved PDA you can get that will let you sync your work email. Some models also double as cell phones.
You know you're sitting in a room of "very important bureaucrats" because you see them checking their email during meetings.
The ostensible reason they're so popular is during 9/11, cellphones didn't work, but Blackberries worked fine.
My father is a blogger.
The Blackberry is popular because it does what you want it to do without any hassle. Other PDA Email devices suck in comparison. It seems so simple - basically be a live connected email client, but all the others just have ridiculous methods of going about it.
It's the same thing as Tivo. You don't realize how nice the Tivo is until you try the cable company's DVR. Sure, it accomplishes the task, but it's more painful.
You are quite right about it not hitting the tech crowd very much. The BlackBerry is meant to do one thing, and it does that one thing better than any. Email.
The tech crowd want something like the Treo that can do everything.
The business professional just wants rock solid and secure email. And the BlackBerry offers them that.
Zro . two
"I come from Canada...they say I'm slow....eh?"
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
The thing to keep in mind is that most of the Blackberries being sold are to companies, and that they are buying them primarily for the email (and possibly cell phone/direct connect) functions, not as PDA's.
The Treo may be a better PDA, but the Blackberry is a great email device. With Enterprise Server it's easy to set up and manage, and it's pretty intuitive to use.
We've started getting some Blackberries at the college where I work, as sort of a pilot program. I recently got a Blackberry 7220 (Nextel) thru work and am pretty happy with it - except for no longer having an excuse to tell my boss that I didn't get her email
I have blog like everyone else
I work for a mid-sized CPA firm, and I have to manage our Blackberries. I have had more problems with them than any other handheld. From parts of the address book being completely lost, both on the handheld and in Groupwise, to duplicated calendar entries, to some accounts simply refusing to synchronize. There tech-support is a shame, every time I call I get the same answer, "Delete the RIM folder under application data." We told our Partners not to get them, but they just had to have them because "everyone else has them so they must work" we showed the examples of people having problems with them, but "that must be isolated." Now since they don't work, it must be GroupWise's fault because so-and-so uses Outlook and it works fine. If you look at the Blackberry Forums there are plenty of Outlook users having issues, and deleting the Outlook profile seems to be the fix-all, thats a pain when you consider 4,000 person address books and 2000 calendar entries. Funny though, one Partner decided to go with the Treo, and I have never had to work on it since he got it a year and a half ago.
I'd heard of it before.. some US type managers came over here and demanded it was issued to them. It needs a dedicated server (not compatible with IMAP.. ffs!) and was vetoed on financial grounds.
I saw one up close once.. damn fugly with a tiny qwerty keyboard & mmonochrome display.
Out in Vegas a few weeks ago at a convention, I bet I saw 50 Treo's clipped to people's belts (both techie and management types), while I saw a grand total of ONE blackberry.
The thing that really struck me about the blackberry was it's size. The bulk of the Treo took a little getting used to for me, but that blackberry was huge.
It does work with exchange, but you have to add more "stuff" to exchange to make it work.
Ideally, the blackberry should look like every other email user in the world out there.
In other words, the middleware (the toll bridge) that blackberry has built is, in my opinion, superfluous. It forces the infrastructure to treat users differently based on the type of end device.
What I'd rather see is the blackberry use existing protocols (Secure IMAP? POP via secure tunnel?)
I'm not blaming blackberry I like their business plan or saying their technology is bad it isn't. The stuff seems to work.
I think the entire device is superfluous.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you