BlackBerrys Creators Dont Forget Roots

BlackBerrys Creators Dont Forget Roots

"BlackBerrys Creators Dont Forget Roots
Staff and agencies
25 October, 2005

By BETH DUFF-BROWN, Sat Oct 22, 4:16 PM ET

WATERLOO, Ontario - Youve likely seen their famous faces in American Express television commercials:
Robert De Niro ruminating over his city;
Ellen DeGeneres dancing to her own beat;
and Mike Lazaridis scribbling on his blackboard. Mike Lazaridis?

While the seemingly unpronounceable name and pudgy every-man mug are relatively unknown outside Canada, the co-creator of the BlackBerry wireless e-mail device is an icon back home.

Canadians proudly claim him as their own Bill Gates . Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, the other man behind the pioneering BlackBerry, are among Canadas most revered sons in these dawning days of the Information Age.

Well, not exactly everybody.

The two have earned hundreds of millions dollars with the six-year-old BlackBerry, which was originally developed by engineers at their Research in Motion Ltd., for internal use.

Like Gates who throws much of his money at AIDS research and Third World education the RIM executives are directing big chunks of their formidable fortunes toward projects in fostering innovation, improving education and seeking to make government more responsive.

Lazaridis and Balsillie, both 44 and fathers of two young children, still work out of modest offices at RIM headquarters in Waterloo, a bedroom community an hours drive from Toronto. "

Lazaridis started RIM in 1984 with his childhood friend Douglas Fregin, who‘s still a vice president of the company. Balsillie joined in 1992.

The company‘s first product was a networked display system that scrolled words across LED signs in General Motors factories.

Lazaridis never forgot a high school electronics shop teacher, who took him to ham-radio swap meets and once told him: The guy who puts wireless and computers together will truly create something special.

He sat at his basement computer one night in 1997 and e-mailed his office a white paper,
"Success Lies in Paradox."
When is a tiny keyboard more efficient than a large one, he asked.

When you use your thumbs.


73 fer nw,
Bob N5IET

10X# 37210, FP#-1141, SMIRK#-5177
http://www.n5iet.com/
Code may be taking a back seat for now,
but the pioneering spirit that put the code
there in the first place is out front of it all.