Few people are aware of the name of the company RIM, (standing for Research in Motion) founded in 1984 by Mike Lazaridis, but the word ‘BlackBerry’ is associated the world over with a handheld communication device that has transformed the way we stay in touch as we go about our daily lives. Even the newly elected President of the United States, Barack Obama, announced that he would have to be surgically removed from his BlackBerry device when his protection officers raised concerns about the security risks if his information was compromised by hackers.
The man behind the BlackBerry is a modest, private man whose lifelong interest in how things work may yet lead to a breakthrough in mankind’s understanding of our place in the universe. At the age of 12, Lazaridis won a prize for reading every science book in his local public library, and instead of watching television, he spent his childhood with friends building rockets, radios, mechanical ghosts and chemical bombs in the basement of the Lazaridis home. In secondary school, a far-sighted teacher and the benevolence of an industrialist who donated electronic equipment for the students to work on helped to stimulate his interest in electronics, and at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, he was exposed to early thinking on email and networks “before anyone knew what LANs were”.
Impatient to put his fascination with the science to work, Lazaridis left university shortly before he was due to graduate, having won a contract with General Motors to develop a network computer control display system. In 1984, at the age of 23, he set up Research in Motion. One of the company’s early projects, to develop a digital bar-code reader for film editing, took him to Hollywood to pick up a technical Oscar for his contribution to speeding up the previously laborious process. But it was its work in wireless technology that would eventually make RIM and its founder famous.
Changing the way we live and work
A modest man, Lazaridis is quick to acknowledge that the original insight for the development of the BlackBerry came from that inspirational teacher at his secondary school, who advised his students, “Don’t get too hooked on computers. Someday, the person who puts wireless and computers together is really going to make something.” Years later, Lazaridis remembered this advice and began working on technology to push email messages to mobile devices. The original BlackBerry, introduced in 1999, was an email extension of the company’s earlier success with two-way paging devices. Ten years later, in fiscal 2009, the company shipped 26 million BlackBerry smartphones, reporting a turnover for the year of $11 billion.
The BlackBerry’s tremendous success has brought its developer considerable wealth, but by all accounts, Lazaridis does not live a lavish lifestyle. He is a devoted family man, who admits only to an indulgence in expensive cars. What he does spend his money on is his first and most enduring passion – science. In the year 2000, Lazaridis founded the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI), based in Waterloo, Ontario, which he has endowed with $150m of his own money. He has also donated over $50 million to his old alma mater, the University of Waterloo, to support work in its Institute for Quantum Computing and the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology.
Today, PI has over 85 resident researchers working on projects in the areas of cosmology, particle physics, quantum physics and superstring theory, and operates a broad outreach programme to share the results of its work with wide cross-sections of society. In addition to generating a core of top international talent, one of its stated objectives is to accommodate graduate students from Canadian universities, “thereby ensuring a lively and dynamic research environment.
“The university environment is a special fertile ground where students are exposed to technology… that becomes the game changers decades out,” Lazaridis told the EE Times. “By learning about something early and getting involved in it in a meaningful way there is a good chance they will come up with something that will change the way people do business or entertain themselves.”
But no one, including enthusiast Lazaridis, believes that work on fundamental physics will change lives in the very near future. PI cites the example of Maxwell’s discovery of a unified theory of electricity and magnetism in the 1860s, which lead to Marconi sending the first wireless message between continents at the turn of the century and the subsequent birth of the communication age. Tangible, commercial results of research in theoretical physics, PI advised, may not be apparent for 20, 30, 40 years or even longer.
Enterprise solutions
Lazaridis himself knows the value of waiting and perfecting a killer technology. “When I introduced the BlackBerry 10 years ago,” he recently told Brett Winterford of Australia’s IT News, “I couldn’t explain it, people didn’t understand it. People didn’t know what we were trying to do. But you know what? That gap gave us the opportunity to get it right – to develop it and perfect it over a decade.”
Because the initial focus of the BlackBerry device was to move data rather than voice, he would argue, the system was better prepared for convergence of the two in today’s smartphones. In designing their bespoke operating system, radio code and 3G stack, RIM’s development team focused on minimising waste, both in bandwidth and energy utilisation. The result is a device that not only conserves internal battery power, but also carrier network capacity, an important consideration now that consumer phone manufacturers like Nokia, Samsung and Apple are muscling in on BlackBerry’s enterprise turf.
According to Juniper Research, sales of smartphones will rise by 95 percent to over 300 million by 2013. The increasing demand is being pulled by the appeal of Web 2.0 social networking capabilities, and that demand is literally pulling RIM into the consumer market.
But even as RIM is adding consumer friendly user applications and interfaces, the rules in that market are changing. “In two years,” Roberta Cozza, Principal Analyst with Gartner Group says, “we won’t be talking about operating systems, and wireless email will have become commoditised. What will be important is ownership of the ecosystem around the mobile device community.”
Included in the ecosystem are partnerships with carriers and applications developers, both essential to providing the user with the most versatile and reliable experience. But despite his fascination with theoretical science, working in partnerships is another of Lazaridis’ strengths. His closest associate in RIM until very recently was the same childhood friend that helped build grand inventions in the Lazaridis basement several decades ago. And from 1992, Lazaridis has worked alongside his joint CEO, Jim Balsillie to manage a business that has less than one percent staff turnover. Balsillie drives corporate strategy, business development and finance, while Lazaridis is responsible for product strategy, research and development and manufacturing. “My job is to get the money,” Balsillie told Erin Anderssen of Toronto’s Globe and Mail. “Mike’s job is to spend it.”
Judging by the company’s ambitious plans to penetrate both the European and consumer markets, while at the same time protecting its niche in the enterprise space, there will be no shortage of projects for Lazaridis to spend RIM’s money on for many years to come. At the same time, his passion to push the boundaries of our knowledge of space and time will ensure he is also never short of project or two for spending his own pocket money on.