BlackBerry Planet E-Book

Alastair Sweeny

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 402

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

BlackBerry Planet is a new tribe of people who simply cannot get along without their favorite device, Research in Motion's innovative electronic organizer, the BlackBerry. This omnipresent device has gone beyond being the world's foremost mobile business tool and entered the consumer mainstream as the Swiss Army Knife of smart phones. BlackBerry Planet tells the behind-the-scenes story of how this little device has become the machine that connects the planet. Starting with the early years of Mike Lazaridis' invention and his founding of RIM at age 23, it details his drive to innovate, developing what was a glorified pager into the essential corporate communicator, used by everyone from dealmakers to the Queen, from movie stars to the entire US Congress. Since 1992, Lazaridis and co-CEO Jim Balsillie together have been the driving force behind the RIM story. With access to senior staffers and former RIM employees, BlackBerry Planet tells the inside story about the branding and marketing success of the BlackBerry, from its use during 9/11, which earned RIM a reputation for security and reliability, to the cultural adoption of the iconic device as a must-have symbol, to the backlash against the addictive properties of the "CrackBerry," and the various patent suits RIM has had to fight off - including the five-year court battle that resulted in the largest technology patent settlement in US history. As the incredible story of the BlackBerry unfolds, and as RIM battles global giants like Nokia and Apple in the emerging super-phone marketplace, users, fans, investors and competitors can look to BlackBerry Planet for the insight and context of where they've been, to try and predict where they're going.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgements

A Web Support Service for Readers

Chapter 1 - The Planet Goes BlackBerry

Chapter 2 - The Birth of the BlackBerry

Chapter 3 - Lawsuits in Motion

Chapter 4 - From Brand to Icon: Seven Years in Motion

Chapter 5 - BlackBerry Jam

Chapter 6 - The Rise of the TeleBrain

Afterword: RIM on the Plateau?

Index

Copyright © 2009 Alastair Sweeny

All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1-800-893-5777.

BlackBerry is a registered trademark of Research In Motion Limited. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Canada Ltd, is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Sweeny, Alastair

BlackBerry planet : the story of Research in Motion and the little device that took the world by storm / Alastair Sweeny.

Includes index.

eISBN : 978-0-470-67581-6

1. Research in Motion (Firm)—History. 2. BlackBerry (Computer). I. Title. HD9696.2.C34R.7’610041670971 C2009-902929-4

Production Credits

Cover design: Ian Koo

Interior design: Adrian So

Typesetter: Thomson Digital

Printer: Tri-Graphic Printing

John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd.

6045 Freemont Blvd.

Mississauga, Ontario

L5R 4J3

TR

This one’s for Gaëtane and Sophie.

Preface

Welcome to BlackBerry Planet.

When I started to research this book and study Research in Motion (RIM), I simply wanted to explore how a Greek-Canadian wireless geek and his Harvard MBA hockey jock sidekick invented, perfected and took to market the world’s most addictive device, the BlackBerry. Another typical high-tech success story, right?

But as I dug deeper into the remarkable history of Research In Motion, I found there’s a lot more to this tale than just a company romance, although on its own it is an extraordinary story. The birth of RIM’s BlackBerry and other mobile Web devices like Apple’s iPhone marks a major turning point in how we live and work. It also points the way toward a much more spectacular device that is now emerging—a tool I call the TeleBrain.

It soon struck me that the world has suddenly changed course and is evolving in ways that seem like 1950s science fiction. As my old teacher Marshall McLuhan famously put it, the human race is starting to plug deeply into electric technology, and we are increasingly wearing our brains outside our skulls.

But how did this change of course happen so fast? It’s as if a light bulb switched on in a dark room. Suddenly, there is a huge tribe of 25 million people who simply cannot get along without RIM’s electronic organizer. The change started in the enterprise, and virtually all major corporations use BlackBerry servers. In a few short years, the BlackBerry has become the world’s foremost mobile business tool, and the planet’s elite electronic communicator—the US government alone runs over 500,000 BlackBerrys—and some say that BlackBerrys now run the US government.

But RIM’s success story also has a dark side. In the book, we explore the various court cases RIM has faced—including the grueling five-year legal grind that ended in a $650 million payout—the largest technology patent settlement in U.S. history. And we look at abusers of the BlackBerry, people trapped in an always-on world whose personal and family lives are suffering from their dependence on this device.

Big good things often come in small packages, and radical new businesses can rise out of tiny start-up companies.

In 1984, the year Steve Jobs brought out his first Apple Macintosh, Research In Motion (RIM) began life in Waterloo, Ontario, as a two-person tech start-up in a one-room office. The founders were a twenty-three-year-old college dropout named Mike Lazaridis and his boyhood friend Doug Fregin.

From the get-go, RIM was a company with a difference: Mike and Doug were both practical and visionary at the same time, and the pair turned out to be superb engineers. Financed at the start by family funds and a $15,000 government loan, RIM’s first big job was a $600,000 contract making networked LCD display screens for the General Motors Canada assembly line. Ten years later, Mike Lazaridis stood onstage at the Academy Awards and accepted an Oscar from actor Anne Heche for RIM’s Digisync Film Barcode Reader, a device that revolutionized Hollywood.

In the late 1980s, Research In Motion got in bed with AT&T, Rogers and Ericsson and started to build miniature radios and modems to let PCs send data and messages over mobile networks. In 1996, RIM came up with the Inter@ctive Pager 900, the world’s first pocket-sized, two-way pager. Two years later, it built its first BlackBerry, the 950, a wireless wonder that synchronized with a user’s desktop computer and corporate e-mail.

Since 1992, Mike Lazaridis and co-CEO Jim Balsillie have been the tandem team driving the RIM story. BlackBerry Planet details their passion to build and deliver the foremost mobile business tool on the planet. Their BlackBerry has become a compulsory communicator, used by 85 percent of the Fortune 500 companies. The Queen has a BlackBerry and shares her e-mail address with favored subjects. Today’s politicians can’t operate without it—U.S. President Barack Obama’s struggles to keep his device in the White House gained him enormous sympathy. He’s the first BlackBerry president!

With input from RIM veterans and competitors, BlackBerry Planet tells the story of the BlackBerry from its early days, starting with its use during the 9/11 attacks, which earned RIM a reputation for security and reliability. Now the Swiss Army knife of smartphones, RIM’s super-secure e-mail device and Web browser is becoming what the company calls a “lifestyle platform,” packed with applications and features that can do everything from online banking to opening your garage door.

I wrote BlackBerry Planet as a business biography of Research In Motion, but I soon became drawn to the social side of BlackBerry use—the cultural adoption of this iconic device as a must-have status symbol, as well as the backlash against the addictive properties of what quickly became known as the CrackBerry. This little device is having a profound effect on daily life, family relations, and manners, beyond the world of business.

Most governments and businesses which use BlackBerrys get major productivity gains with the devices—studies tell us that BlackBerry use can boost employee productivity by more than 30 percent. It’s helped change the way we communicate in the enterprise, being “always on, always connected.” But at the same time, it is leading to major headaches for managers and employees. Digging deeper into BlackBerry Planet, I found that there is a serious downside to BlackBerry use.

Lazaridis and Balsillie knew they had an addictive device right from the start, but they have always stressed the sunny side of device dependence—Balsillie calls it “calming.” It’s true that BlackBerry-addicted execs who use their device to excess may be more productive, but they can develop an addiction as strong as that experienced by alcoholics or chemical abusers. E-mail-checking junkies who can’t live without their BlackBerrys can’t laugh off the truth—they are addicts.

So, what makes BlackBerry users tick? If you’re a BlackBerry outsider, from another planet, you’ve seen these people:

• hunched over their devices on the train or bus or subway, tip tip tapping with their thumbs, more productive than thou;

• heads bowed in the meeting room, as if in prayer, fiddling over something under the table;

• thumbing in their cars looking as if they are pushing on the horn. When the light turns green, there is a furious beeping as cars honk to get the BlackBerry bozo’s attention.

Or you’re out in a social setting. You’re talking to someone and have her full attention, and then you hear a gentle buzz and suddenly her eyes glaze over. She pulls a BlackBerry out of her pocket, turns her head, and without saying sorry, she is gone, lost in the reply.

Or you and your wife have just forked over a fortune to get tickets for Don Giovanni, and now you are in your seats, entranced by the majesty of the voices. Suddenly your eye is drawn to a little pool of light off to your left, and yes, there is a BlackBerry barbarian, tapping on his infernal little device. The performance is ruined. If you’re a citizen of BlackBerry Planet, however, you’re Lord of the Ringtones. Entering the elevator, as the door closes, you pull out your precious device and check your urgent e-mail, in sync with all the other passengers.

You arrive early at a meeting, and you note with satisfaction that most people sitting at the table have their heads inclined, their eyes cast downward in contemplation, assuming the BlackBerry Prayer Position. You sit down quietly and join them in worship, in tune with the sound of little clicks.

Later, the meeting becomes boring, and you feel a gentle buzz, which sounds kind of like a cross between a bee and a far-away cow. Without attracting notice, you remove the BlackBerry from your pocket, under the table, and sneak a quick peek at the screen.

On Sunday, you’re in church and the sermon is wandering. You find it hard to concentrate, and only with great effort do you resist the urge to answer the buzz in your pocket.

Or you take a winter break with your family, and you’re sitting in a lounge chair on the beach. You tell your family you’re reading an e-book when in fact you’re checking in with the office. You’ve been told that the project cannot go on without your input.

Such is the life of the citizens of BlackBerry Planet.

The addictive, immersive properties of smartphone use are now challenging the whole world of work, and we’re a long way from being able to cope with the new power it gives us.

In offices around the world, workers are drowning in e-mail excess, and BlackBerry use is very much part of the problem. It’s now clear that constant BlackBerry checking can actually nullify gains made in productivity. BlackBerry bondage can also make family life suffer, as employees bring their work home and never really leave the office behind. Any gains people make in organizing family messaging and scheduling, can get cruelly offset by upsets in work-life balance. Says Canadian business professor Linda Duxbury: “Moderate users of the BlackBerry are okay, but for a growing number of people, the BlackBerry only contributes to stress and depression, and a decline in healthy personal and family life.”

How can managers and employees deal with this growing problem? In BlackBerry Planet, I explore the roots of device dependence and show how some people are handling it in creative and practical ways. I also suggest that we must come to terms with the power of mobile computing—and quickly—or risk suffering real social upheaval.

The problem will certainly get worse before it gets better, as many more powerful features are being crammed into new releases of the BlackBerry and rival devices.

In the next twenty years, we’re going to have to learn how to cope with whole new generations of advanced superphones. These in turn will evolve even further into what I call the TeleBrain, a portable device more capable than the human brain itself, one that we can carry around in our pockets or even install under our skin, expanding our powers and connecting us directly with the whole intelligence of the planet.

What of the future of Research In Motion? For a few weeks in 2007, RIM became the largest company in Canada in terms of market cap. Today, battered by the global economic downturn but still driven by the need to compete, RIM is fending off Apple and its superb iPhone while rapidly expanding its own reach across the planet, especially into the billion-fold markets of India and China, where it is tackling the giant Finnish phone company Nokia head-on.

In BlackBerry Planet, I have tried to probe the personal and corporate DNA that has driven Research in Motion and propelled the company over a 25-year period to become a global technology powerhouse, and one of the top three NASDAQ tech favorites—the other two being Apple and Google.

BlackBerry Planet also explores the challenges of taking a dream to market, and meeting the desire of customers all around the world to manage how they communicate to colleagues, clients, friends and loved ones, in the easiest and most secure way possible.

Above all, BlackBerry Planet is about the vision of Mike Lazaridis and his team of engineers, who were at the right place when it mattered and are still turning their vision of the future into reality.

Acknowledgments

Scores of people gave me input and wise counsel with this book. In particular, I’d like to thank John Albright, Sam Archibald, Dale Brubacher-Cressman, Denzil Doyle, Linda Duxbury, Dick Fadden, Robert J. Fraser, Bill Frezza, Iain Grant, Sophie Le Blanc, Gaëtane Lemay, Stephanie MacKendrick, Joe Martin, Don McMurtry, Tim Meyer, Don Morrison, Gary Mousseau, Tony Patterson, Rebecca Reeve, Susan Stranks, Malcolm Sweeny, Kevin Talbot, Matt Walkoff and Elizabeth Woyte, as well as a number of present and former RIM employees who spoke on conditions of anonymity. At Wiley Canada, I would like to thank Karen Milner and her splendid crew: Meghan Brousseau, Michelle Bullard, Deborah Guichelaar, Liz McCurdy, Jennifer Smith, Lucas Wilk and Brian Will, as well as CrackBerry widow Heather Sangster of strongfinish.ca, Carol Long of Wiley Technology Publishing and Joe Wikert, now with O’Reilly Media.

A Web Support Service for Readers

If you are a buyer of this book, you’ll enjoy and profit from my BlackBerry Planet Web Support site at:

http://blackberryplanetbook.com.

You’ll find chapter-related images and video, and a full resource base of BlackBerry related audiovisual files and pictures, documents, patents, financial history, device models, useful Web links, and a bookstore with direct links to order pages at online retailers.

The Web Support site also has clickable Web-linked references that take you right to the original article that I’ve cited. These are indicated at the end of appropriate footnotes in the book with the symbol <*>.

And while I have tried making RIM’s technology features as reader friendly as possible, if you need help with technical terms, and want to understand the mobile universe better, I invite you to use the glossary on the site at: http://blackberryplanetbook.com/index.php/BlackBerry_Planet_Glossary.

I will also be posting from time to time on the BlackBerry Planet Weblog at: http://blackberrynationweblog.blogspot.com/.

Thanks for reading BlackBerry Planet. I hope you enjoy this book and that it gives you insight, context, and understanding about the amazing saga of the BlackBerry. As the story unfolds, and as RIM tackles global giants such as Nokia and Apple in the emerging superphone marketplace, I invite you to look to the BlackBerry Planet Web Support site for future developments.

I welcome your feedback, questions, and comments.

Alastair Sweeny

Ottawa, Canada

[email protected]

May 9, 2009

1

The Planet Goes BlackBerry

“When they go to work, people expect a phone, a desk, a chair, a light. And a BlackBerry has really taken on that status.”

—Mike Lazaridis

Mike Lazaridis’s little device is the favorite fruit of 25 million people across the planet who just can’t get along without their innovative electronic organizer. But a scarce ten years ago, the BlackBerry was known to only a few movers and shakers in Washington, on Wall Street or in big high-tech firms like Intel and IBM.

Back in 1999, Research In Motion (RIM) built the first reliable product to offer two-way mobile e-mail and messaging. At that time, pagers holstered on belts were part of the MD’s or Wall Street broker’s uniform. But they allowed only one-way communication. Lazaridis had realized that corporate technophiles wouldn’t want to be tethered to their computers and would, instead, love to work anywhere, sending and receiving e-mail directly on their pagers.

So, the BlackBerry easily won a favored spot on the belts of hard-charging political staffers and business professionals, from wireless warriors, out in the field and battling for market share, to cubicle cowboys lunching at their desks, hunched over BlackBerrys and juggling work and home.

Today, the BlackBerry monopolizes the world of work—nobody else comes close. An astounding 85 percent of public corporations are supplying staff with the devices, and more than 175,000 BlackBerry Enterprise Servers are installed worldwide. The US Congress was RIM’s first big client, and Uncle Sam is still the biggest consumer of BlackBerrys. Today, more than 500,000 devices are installed in every department of the U.S. government and throughout the US Senate and House of Representatives.

Some larger corporations are handling tens of thousands of e-mail accounts securely and efficiently, and the top three or four companies each manage close to 100,000 BlackBerry users. Security is key. BlackBerry messages are secured with NATO-grade encryption, and network managers love the ability to freeze or wipe data from a lost or stolen BlackBerry.