Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff Page A
Authors: Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff
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that was expected to deliver two-way paging to the masses. The two carriers would regret underestimating the potential of RIM’s wireless e-mail plan.
Handheld wireless e-mail was a breakthrough product nobody knew they wanted. When Balsillie and his new product manager, David Castell, began testing consumer appetite for a mobile e-mail service on the Leapfrog device, they assumed traveling salespeople and other busy professionals would line up for a product that constantly relayed urgent e-mail updates. Instead, focus group research revealed there was no burning desire by participants to quickly read or reply to electronic messages. If they needed to reach colleagues urgently, a phone call would do. At a focus group in Sunnyvale, California, one participant grew antagonistic when showed a device announcing e-mails with a buzzing noise. “If this thing buzzes every time I get an e-mail, you’d better ship it with a hammer,” he warned.
A more helpful insight came from a participant who spent much of his professional life on the road. He approached with dread his evening hotel ritual of downloading the day’s flood of e-mails on his laptop. It was a chore that inevitably involved hours of reading and replying. “If I just had a tool to help me with my volume of e-mail on the road, I’d pay anything,” he said. Convenience, not urgency, was a more potent marketing pitch. This was a device that could free customers to catch up on office communications on their terms. Idle time between meetings or lost time in taxis and airport lounges could be productively spent processing e-mails. Employers would be able to reach staff any time of the day and employees would not have to be tethered to computers. Bosses would never know e-mails were coming from baseball games, the golf course, or family homes.
The next step was positioning the service in the crowded technology market. Lazaridis was so captivated by the concept he argued RIM should sell the Leapfrog as a new product category: e-mail pagers. Castell and RIM’s marketing vice president, Dave Werezak, disagreed. Too many other innovative communicators, such as IBM’s Simon or the EO Personal Communicator, had failed in part because they tried to define new categories and consumers didn’t appreciate or understand what the products offered. RIM managers were influenced by management guru Geoffrey Moore, who argued in his influential book
Inside the Tornado
that innovative technologies had a better chance of success if sold within a proven product category. 1 The most popular handheld device going in 1998 was the Palm Pilot, sold as a personal digital assistant, or PDA. Palm Pilot was a huge hit because it allowed busy professionals to easily store and update calendar and contact information on a pocket-sized device. If the e-mail-enabled Leapfrog came with calendar and contact applications,Castell urged Lazaridis, then RIM could position its product as the most comprehensive PDA on the market. Lazaridis, who used a Palm, worried RIM would be seen as a weakling against the Silicon Valley darling. Castell’s pitch, however, was compelling: “If you want addresses and calendar, go for Palm. If e-mail is important, we’re the PDA to choose.” Lazaridis was swayed. His busy engineers were handed another impossibly short deadline to add calendar and contact applications to the device.
Lazaridis believed RIM’s new device was such a convenience that it would become the preferred mode for exchanging e-mails. For that to happen, the user interface on the Leapfrog—what the customer saw and experienced when using the device—had to be intuitive and easy to operate. “Remove think points,” was one of his favorite phrases. “I liked teaching people to put themselves in the minds of the users,” Lazaridis says. “I wanted to get to the point where users prefer to use [the device] to send messages than actually power their computers.”
E-mails often arrived with a
Handheld wireless e-mail was a breakthrough product nobody knew they wanted. When Balsillie and his new product manager, David Castell, began testing consumer appetite for a mobile e-mail service on the Leapfrog device, they assumed traveling salespeople and other busy professionals would line up for a product that constantly relayed urgent e-mail updates. Instead, focus group research revealed there was no burning desire by participants to quickly read or reply to electronic messages. If they needed to reach colleagues urgently, a phone call would do. At a focus group in Sunnyvale, California, one participant grew antagonistic when showed a device announcing e-mails with a buzzing noise. “If this thing buzzes every time I get an e-mail, you’d better ship it with a hammer,” he warned.
A more helpful insight came from a participant who spent much of his professional life on the road. He approached with dread his evening hotel ritual of downloading the day’s flood of e-mails on his laptop. It was a chore that inevitably involved hours of reading and replying. “If I just had a tool to help me with my volume of e-mail on the road, I’d pay anything,” he said. Convenience, not urgency, was a more potent marketing pitch. This was a device that could free customers to catch up on office communications on their terms. Idle time between meetings or lost time in taxis and airport lounges could be productively spent processing e-mails. Employers would be able to reach staff any time of the day and employees would not have to be tethered to computers. Bosses would never know e-mails were coming from baseball games, the golf course, or family homes.
The next step was positioning the service in the crowded technology market. Lazaridis was so captivated by the concept he argued RIM should sell the Leapfrog as a new product category: e-mail pagers. Castell and RIM’s marketing vice president, Dave Werezak, disagreed. Too many other innovative communicators, such as IBM’s Simon or the EO Personal Communicator, had failed in part because they tried to define new categories and consumers didn’t appreciate or understand what the products offered. RIM managers were influenced by management guru Geoffrey Moore, who argued in his influential book
Inside the Tornado
that innovative technologies had a better chance of success if sold within a proven product category. 1 The most popular handheld device going in 1998 was the Palm Pilot, sold as a personal digital assistant, or PDA. Palm Pilot was a huge hit because it allowed busy professionals to easily store and update calendar and contact information on a pocket-sized device. If the e-mail-enabled Leapfrog came with calendar and contact applications,Castell urged Lazaridis, then RIM could position its product as the most comprehensive PDA on the market. Lazaridis, who used a Palm, worried RIM would be seen as a weakling against the Silicon Valley darling. Castell’s pitch, however, was compelling: “If you want addresses and calendar, go for Palm. If e-mail is important, we’re the PDA to choose.” Lazaridis was swayed. His busy engineers were handed another impossibly short deadline to add calendar and contact applications to the device.
Lazaridis believed RIM’s new device was such a convenience that it would become the preferred mode for exchanging e-mails. For that to happen, the user interface on the Leapfrog—what the customer saw and experienced when using the device—had to be intuitive and easy to operate. “Remove think points,” was one of his favorite phrases. “I liked teaching people to put themselves in the minds of the users,” Lazaridis says. “I wanted to get to the point where users prefer to use [the device] to send messages than actually power their computers.”
E-mails often arrived with a
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