Annaliza E. Nebres

OOC

Case Study 10

Mike Lazaridis

(Co founder, Research in motion)

Mike Lazaridis founded the Research in Motion (RIM). He built it with his friend Doug Fregin in 1984 and they were will under grad at the University of Waterloo. RIM was one of the first companies to appreciate the importance of wireless networks. One of their projects was the local area network that ran industrial displays. In 190’s Lazaridis foresaw the potential of mobile email when email was still largely unknown. The BlackBerry as one of the innovations that not only became popular, but change the way organizations operates.

Mike and Doug know each other since grades school but they stated to work together in high school. They learn to use computers on their own way back in the late ‘70s. Computers were still punch card systems wherein some other building that you never get to see. They’ve learned about the actual fundamentals in computers when they have computer trainers in Digital Equipment Corporation and it made difference as time went on. Contact work would have been in his third year and in his fourth year he started RIM. It is his one way to earn money to support his study. He was working of new languages that were sort of beginnings of what became Java. He draw difficult parallel, but he is working on something called DTOIC, a interpretative language that they were getting working on various microcomputer at that time. They apply to the Canadian government and hopefully they’ve got the grant. They also stated recognizing the wireless data technology. 

They’ve been interested to this thing and suddenly he received interest from Cantel, now Rogers. He met with the president and started talking about the system that they had just bought called Mobitex, it was a wireless data system. They needed someone to wrote some software and help them make it work. They wrote the very first wireless protocol software, Application Programming Interface (API) development tools, all the early stuff for first wireless data networks. And from that they started producing products.

It was the beginning of turning point. They don’t know yet what wireless data is. Cell phones were just happening. He got the opportunity to work for SPAR Aerospace, a Canadian company. On the day the Black Berry was the only system that works well and reliably secure under the conditions. Black Berry back then was called an Interactive Pager. It was their turning point because they’ve used the documents for years and still used it because it defines the essence of BlackBerry. BlackBerry ended up being one of the all time most famous brand world wide. They had an email at RIM as soon as they stated the company. It wasn’t until five years later they state to coverage on something Fax Number because every time Lazaridis gave his card people would always asked “what’s an email address?”

The things that I’ve learned was you should have a lot of faith and visualize what will happen in the future. It’s a combination of vision and faith. You should think first that it will happen someday. That all the things that you have done have a value. And you can accomplish it, in an economic way and growth of the business.