Free Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff

convinced his competitors, like German soldiers searching in the desert for the Ark of the Covenant, “were digging in the wrong place.”
    The competitor digging with the largest shovel was Motorola, then the dominant global maker of cellphones and pagers. The Chicago firm opened a new market with Tango, a pager that not only received messages but enabled responses. Unlike the elegant dance that inspired its name, the device was clumsy. Tango expertly received short text messages over Motorola’s ReFLEX paging network, but it stumbled with replies because it didn’t have sufficient transmission power. Message replies were limited to a series of canned responses, such as “running late” or “will call later.”
    Another contender was Nokia’s 9000 Communicator, a book-sized tool that looked like a cellphone strapped onto a mini keyboard. A precursor to the smartphone, the 9000 combined computing, cellular, and Internet applications such as browsing and e-mail. The Finnish phone was so glamorous it was used by Val Kilmer’s Simon Templar character in the 1997 remake of
The Saint.
Few consumers, however, could afford the $800 price tag, and wireless cellular network carriers more accustomed to handling voice traffic charged a fortune to relay such data-heavy communications.
    One company had more success creating a portable office aide: RIM nemesis U.S. Robotics. Its Palm Pilot 1000, launched in 1996, the year after U.S. Robotics bought California startup Palm computing, was a sleek device storing calendar, contact, and other information that could be synchronized with users’ computers. Promoted as a personal digital assistant, the Palm was an instant hit with professionals. You didn’t need an engineering degree to operate the machine. And unlike Newton’s faulty handwriting, the Palm came with a digital keyboard that was easily operated with a stylus. No more “egg freckles.” Missing from the Palm Pilot, however, was a wireless connection. Fans would have to wait until 1999 for a new Palm Pilot to be linked wirelessly to the Internet and e-mail.
    RIM was quietly putting the finishing touches on its own handheld communicator in the spring of 1996. Its conquer-the-world strategy was audacious for a company with fewer than one hundred employees, but RIM’s low profile had its advantages: bigger global companies didn’t take the small Waterloo company seriously. “We seem to be doing quite well without anyone knowing,” Lazaridis told the
Globe and Mail
in one of his first mainstream media interviews. Working in the shadows, Lazaridis’s team had accumulated eight years of experience helping Sweden’s Ericsson, Toronto’s Rogers, and New Jersey’s RAM Mobile Data, the small wireless data arm of BellSouth, transform Mobitex into a working radio network with better coverage across the continent than its main rival, ARDIS, the data network that was created by Motorola for IBM and sold to American Mobile Satellite in early 1998.
    By the mid-1990s, Rogers and RAM Mobile had little to show for hundreds of millions of dollars spent expanding the networks. Radio-transmitted data was an expensive and nonessential service. Mobitex and ARDIS had fewer than fifty thousand customers. 9 Media and industry players questioned the future of radio networks. AT&T was developing a faster network technology that was due to be launched imminently. If Mobitex didn’t attract more traffic, Rogers and RAM Mobile would surely abandon the costly wireless exchange. Such a move would be fatal for RIM. Lazaridis had devoted years to Mobitex by designing many of the on-ramps to the rickety information highway. It was RIM that created a software-based system of universal digital rules that allowed different types of computers to exchange data. And it was RIM’s portable radio modems that drew laptop and mobile device users to the Mobitex roadways.
    When RIM’s radio modem went into production in 1995, Lazaridis believed it was a