THE BLACKBERRY BOY RESEARCH IN MOTION | CANADA
It's a classic new-economy fable: a university student starts a tech firm in Silicon Valley, never bothers to graduate and goes on to make billions. The only difference between that legend and the true story of Mike Lazaridis, founder of Research in Motion (RIM), is that it took Lazaridis about a decade to come up with his killer idea, and when his epiphany did come, it happened in Canada, not California.
RIM was a little-known company until five years ago, when it launched its BlackBerry, a handheld gadget for writing and receiving secure e-mail. Before that Lazaridis tinkered with industrial displays and developed a fast way to read time codes on film. "We've always been innovative," he says. "Whatever we get involved in, we sink our teeth into." Today the very term BlackBerry is synonymous with wireless e-mail. More than 1 million people use the gizmo, led by a long list of the rich and famous that RIM says includes George W. Bush, Sarah Jessica Parker, George Clooney and the Beckhams. "We got into a market where there was really nothing there," says Lazaridis, 43, who founded RIM in 1984 as a student at the University of Waterloo, near Toronto. Last year the number of people using a BlackBerry doubled, and in the three months through June alone, RIM shipped more than 500,000 devices, almost three times as many as a year earlier, according to research firm Gartner Inc.
That may not be anywhere near the hundreds of millions of mobile phones sold every year, but the growth has made a huge impression on cell-phone and PDA vendors. Nokia, Siemens, Samsung, Sony, Ericsson, Microsoft and PalmSource have licensed RIM's e-mail software, helping the company ring up $594.6 million in revenues in 2003, making it almost double its size of a year earlier. Why did the device catch on so fast? Unlike earlier handhelds, the BlackBerry pushed e-mail right to the device, rather than merely alerting users that they had e-mail the device could fetch. It also let employees send and receive using their corporate addresses, just as if they were in the office. RIM's curved layout of button-like keys has also made thumb operation a breeze. "It's very difficult to get someone to use another device," says Gartner vice president Ken Dulaney.
RIM is facing new challenges. If the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington does not overturn a lower-court ruling that RIM violated patents held by a rival, the company could be barred from selling in the U.S. And Lazaridis has to worry that his licensees might kill his hardware business--although, even if they do, RIM still has a healthy software and services business, which brings in close to one-third of its revenues. BlackBerry's success has made Lazaridis wealthy enough to donate more than $100 million to his other passion--quantum computing research--at the University of Waterloo, where the former dropout is now chancellor. One more reason for techies to give him the thumbs-up. --By Mark Halper
THE SOFTWARE GLOBALIST INFOSYS | INDIA