Founders at Work.pdf

Mike Lazaridis 149
invested in to actually get the system to work properly. To this day, the
BlackBerry is the only system that works well and is reliably secure under those
conditions.
Fifteen years ago, this was still a bit of a research project, and we were
spending a lot of time on that. But the product itself, its final form, was still too
unwieldy to be able to put in your pocket. That was our goal. We realized early
on that the function was there, but the value was limited by the packaging and
limitations of the technology of the day.
So we started working on this, and it was just about the time when my son
was born. I remember coming home, and my son had had a more difficult day,
and I had to take over. I remember just getting him to bed, and then I went
downstairs and got on the computer, and I put on some music and just started
writing. Three hours later, I had just put the finishing touches on what became
the plan for what eventually became the BlackBerry. Back then, it was called an
interactive pager—I coined the phrase “interactive pager.” Then what I did was
come up with five improvements to the wireless data networks that would allow
us to provide a reliable experience that was also power efficient. I came up with
the basic premise as to where the value was and what became the foundational
underpinnings of our technology for almost a decade after that point. As soon as
I sent it to the office, that’s when my son woke up.
That was a turning point, because we’ve used that document for years. It’s
still used by people here because it defines the essence of the BlackBerry experience,
and it has allowed us to remain true to that and really bring value to our
customers. It helped us stay away from the fads that really didn’t bring any
value and just made the product more complicated and more expensive and
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”?