From: Ian Andrew Bell (ian@cafe.net)
Date: Thu Jun 22 2000 - 19:19:23 PDT
I've been a RIM user for a few months (BellSouth) and a RIM investor for
more than a year (bought at $24CDN, thanks!).
I think that the Blackberry is a kick-ass product that acutely hits the
market it's focused on. I also think that, even with the smaller screen of
the 950, it is 200% more useful than any of the three Palm Computing
devices I've owned (and subsequently abandoned to my stack of milk crates
containing useless gadgetry).
I certainly hope that we're not going to get into a debate because your
correspondent thinks that the Canadian government is engaging in unfair
trade practises and trying to kill the US PDA market with cheaper, inferior
products.
Technology Partnerships Canada is a highly elitist and conservative venture
capital fund that the government has created to help established companies
(not startups) go-to-market and which returns short-term revenue both to
the company and to the fund. Beyond the initial grant, TPC his supposed to
be %50 self-funding. It goes without saying that TPC has a potential
audience of fewer than 200 companies, and RIM is one of a handful of
companies (read: NORTEL) for which TPC was specifically created.
The RIM Blackberry is the fastest-to-market wide-area-coverage wireless
email device on the market. Full stop. It's an amazing success story from
a company that's really not the world's greatest marketer, but with the
right push it could unseat Palm and Handspring as the collective heirs
apparent to the connected PIM (hell, even just the PIM) market.
The RIM 957 has embarrassed everyone else:
Palm, Minstrel, Microsoft, Handspring, IBM... they were all caught sleeping
by the MOBITEX network (of all things!) and the device which exploits it.
If I was RIM I'd be spending that $23M on opening up a can of marketing
whup-ass on the PDA guys (looks like they are). Let's see if the 957
passes the Palm VII in sales in the next few months.
-Ian.
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