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Happy Anniversary to the Blackberry! Is it really only 10 years? Like it or not, it has changed our world.
Memories of BlackBerry still vivid 10 years later
Peter Lee, Record staff
Email the author
Software VP was shocked device named after a fruit
January 31, 2009
Matt Walcoff RECORD STAFF -KITCHENER
Ten years ago, developers at Research In Motion were working on an exciting project called PocketLink when they got the word from the marketing department that from then on, they were to refer to their creation by the name of a fruit.
"I can remember clearly at the end of '98 being shocked when they picked the name out," says Gary Mousseau, the Waterloo company's acting vice-president of software at the time.
"I was just floored. We didn't have the branding, marketing and sales experience of these guys.
We weren't appreciating their skill set."
Fortunately, the name BlackBerry stuck despite the techies' objections.
Ten years later, the Waterloo Region Record brought together some of the people involved in the creation of the BlackBerry to swap stories and talk about the genesis of the device that would change the world.
They certainly didn't feel like they were changing the world at first, says Mousseau, who was hired as RIM's 11th employee in 1991 and is now an intellectual property consultant. RIM, founded in 1984, had created an innovative device simply dubbed the 950.
It looked like a pager, but with a full keyboard, expanded monochrome screen and Intel 386 processor inside.
To the frustration of RIM's employees, the company's customers were not taking full advantage of the device's capabilities. They were using it with old servers and weak networks, mostly limiting its use to paging.
RIM was largely focused on paging in the late 90s, with email as an afterthought, says Dave Castell, who was on the marketing team for the original BlackBerry and is now retired.
"The BlackBerry project actually was more like hedging our bets or the contingency plan in case the first plan didn't work out," he said.
RIM, however, was an early adopter of email in the workplace, says Dale Brubacher-Cressman, one of RIM's first employees and program manager for handheld development in the late '90s.
So RIM had an inkling just how much of an advantage ready access to email might be.
"I think there was a realization that this could be a game-changing solution," says Brubacher-Cressman, now president of Vigor Clean Tech, an alternative-energy company in Kitchener.
"I don't think we ever imagined it would be anywhere near as popular as it became."
Mike Lazaridis, the company's founder and current co-chief executive officer, Mousseau and a few others had jury-rigged an email solution on their 950s by forwarding their work email inboxes to their mobile devices. It worked only one way; they couldn't reply to the messages.
But "it was exciting enough that one day Mike just called me into his office and said, 'Gary, we're going to solve this two-mailbox problem once and for all,' and we just started hashing it out," Mousseau says.
The two-mailbox problem meant that existing mobile devices could not work with users' work email, requiring a separate mailbox for mobile use. RIM's achievement was a solution that integrated the mobile device with the same mailbox used at the office.
RIM's employees were the test subjects for the BlackBerry email technology as the company worked on it in 1998.
They also became the first CrackBerry addicts.
"How we just did business just accelerated for me, at least in software," Mousseau says. "I got my answers so much faster; the roadblocks were just cleared quicker; I could just make decisions faster in '98."
The first devices -- machines that got BlackBerry email quickly became known as BlackBerrys -- were intended for text alone.
Conventional wisdom at RIM in the late '90s was that multi-use smartphones would never work, and the company was reluctant even to put a phone in the devices.
At the time, Jim Balsillie, RIM's other co-CEO, would compare what he called "everything devices" to the Chevrolet El Camino, the half-car, half-pickup truck that wasn't particularly good at being either, says Steve Carkner, former director of product development at the company.
Carkner now is chief executive officer of Panacis Medical in Ottawa.
Lazaridis is often called the creator of the BlackBerry. In fact, many people had a hand in the device's creation, from executives to overworked co-op students who developed software on RIM's then-modest budget.
But none of the RIM old-timers begrudged Lazaridis any of the credit.
"I'm not sure you could have replaced him with anyone else and still had BlackBerry," Brubacher-Cressman says.
"He obviously had a lot of really smart and really talented people working for him, but it was his job of pulling all that together."
mwalcoff@therecord.com
Monday, February 2, 2009
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