Rapid Motion

At first, he wouldn't let himself believe it. But once the guys from Motorola showed up, Mark Guibert knew that he and his colleagues were on the verge of the big breakthrough. Guibert, 36, is vice president of brand management of a midsize Canadian company called Research In Motion Ltd., or RIM, which makes radio-based modems and wireless handheld communications devices. Three years ago, he was at a trade show -- PCIA GlobalXChange, the personal-computer industry's coming-out party for all things wireless. As a crowd squeezed into RIM's booth, he noticed several engineer types who had reversed their ID badges, hoping to slip in anonymously. Guibert figured out that they were from Boynton Beach, Florida, where Motorola's messaging division is headquartered. For two days, the trade-show floor had buzzed about the ultracool email machine that RIM was previewing. People from Motorola, which had just launched its PageWriter2000 wireless device, wanted to find out what was up.

What the incognito visitors saw was a device poised to become the next big thing in mobile communications: a two-way pager the size of a cigarette pack, with a tiny screen for displaying text and built-in keys the size of Tic Tacs for punching in messages with your thumbs. Guibert watched as his archrivals registered "a bit of shock and a bit of uneasiness" over the BlackBerry, a 4.5-ounce device that people at RIM promised would enable users to send email messages anytime, from anywhere, without any hassle.

"The experience was surreal," says Guibert. "I realized that after 10 years of researching and experimenting with wireless technology, we had done something right. I also had another realization: that the days of working in stealth mode were over."

RIM launched the BlackBerry in January 1999. The company has been on a roll ever since. The BlackBerry has proved to be something of a rarity in the mobile-computing world: a wireless gadget that's actually useful. Giant corporations such as Credit Suisse First Boston, IBM, Intel Corp., Merrill Lynch, and Oracle have outfitted thousands of their employees with RIM's pocket emailer, as have the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force.

Devotees of the BlackBerry became easy to spot, thumb-typing on the pager-sized device during a quick lunch or an endless meeting. Sending email with the devices proved to be so habit-forming that partners at the Boston-based VC firm Charles River Ventures jettisoned their PalmPilots and dubbed RIM's gizmo the "CrackBerry." Reportedly, the device was banned from meetings at Loudcloud Inc., chief Netscapee Marc Andreessen's Web-infrastructure development company: Too many staffers were furtively thumb-typing email messages.

Over the past year, as much of the tech sector imploded, Wall Street let loose with one big raspberry at BlackBerry's maker. RIM's shares skidded from a 52-week high of $132 to $15 this past March. But a funny thing happened while its stock was tumbling. RIM kept selling BlackBerries. In April, it announced a blowout fourth quarter. RIM racked up a profit of $8.3 million, compared with $3.2 million a year earlier; revenue for fiscal 2001 was 160% better than for fiscal 2000.

The future seems to promise even more rapid-motion growth. RIM's workforce has more than doubled in the past nine months to more than 1,400 employees. It's also building a second manufacturing facility that's capable of cranking out 5 million units a year, for a sixfold increase in capacity.

"Everyone's got to be concerned about the current market and the IT spending environment," cautions Mike Lazaridis, RIM's 40-year-old founder, president, and co-CEO -- and a man not given to speaking with exclamation points. But even as he expresses solidarity with the rest of the tech sector, he insists that RIM won't lower its sights. "We have discovered the first true wireless-communications appliance, and people are becoming addicted to it. It's hard not to be optimistic."

How will RIM get to the next level? By adopting the very tactics that enabled it to create a pocket-sized gizmo that could send an email message winging across the airwaves and safely into your inbox. To build a wireless device is to cope with a world of constant, severe design constraints -- of limited power, limited network capacity, limited screen space. As RIM raises the curtain on its own Act II, it offers the rest of us uncommon common sense for thriving in these constrained times. Here are the five design principles behind RIM's rapid motion.