Ode to My BlackBerry

I just received my new Motorola Droid X from Verizon and I love it.

As a BlackBerry user, it was hard parting with my 8800. I was a very early BlackBerry adopter having acquired 50 BlackBerry 950’s for my company in 1997.

The BlackBerry 950 was a remarkable device. I already carried a mobile phone and a Motorola pager, but the BlackBerry gave me real-time email, calendar, and contacts anywhere, anytime. It’s form factor was smaller than my pager, it had a full keyboard (with keys spaced apart), and this crazy thumbwheel. The most important attributes were the end-to-end encryption, 2 to 3 weeks battery life (with 1 AA battery), and its reliability. In my opinion, Research In Motion (RIM) got it right.

Having managed an IT organization in an investment management firm, I was fortunate to have met Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis (co-CEOs of RIM) a number of times. I remember them talking about focusing on what was really important to people, reliability, security, and battery life. RIM wrote high performance software that ran in DOS on an 80386 processor. We couldn’t understand how they did it (the 80386 could only be found in the Boston Computer Museum, at that time).

Jim and Mike didn’t see the need for a touch and color screen (like the PalmPilot) just for sending and receiving email. Their focus was on building the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and allowing us to no longer need client software on the desktop to receive Exchange-based emails. As a corporate IT person, this made my life much easier. Imagine that, a hardware/software vendor making things easier for IT.

Jim and Mike listened to customers, and taught us to do the same. We learned we didn’t need to engineer solutions to meet every need. We could focus on what was really important and do it right. The BlackBerry was an example of how to build something satisfying the needs of the user and meeting the requirements of an IT organization (Steve Jobs, take notice). It made IT staff look like heroes.

I remember 9/11 when we couldn’t reach anyone in NYC (we were in Boston). Landlines and cellular phones were at capacity and you couldn’t get a call through. BlackBerry’s ran on the Mobitex network which, surprisingly, was still running throughout New York City. It was the lifeline for many who were stranded and needed to let people know they were all right.

So, why am I retiring my BlackBerry 8830? Unfortunately the device just couldn’t keep up with everything it was trying to do. Almost daily, the device would freeze after a phone call. Internet connectivity was sketchy, at best, and very slow when it was working. Battery life was down to about 1 day (less, if my FaceBook app was running), and HTML emails didn’t work very well. Current BlackBerrys try to be everything to everyone. Unfortunately, at the cost of less reliability, no battery life, and slow performance.

As I bid a fond farewell to my BlackBerry, I wanted to thank Jim and Mike. They architected things like security into their framework and made that one less thing I needed to worry about. They developed one of the most efficient hardware and software solutions I have ever seen. Finally, they taught me to be a better IT person by listening to my users and applying what I heard into a focused and robust solution.