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."

Comments

My brief encouner with them

[PhotoGuy]

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.