Very few companies nail their value proposition in their first try. Apple with the iPod, of course, a great example of product that was very successful in its first iteration. The BlackBerry today is also another successful device with its own iconic following – the so called “Crackberry” addicts. But few people know how even in the early days RIM did a great job of delivering a compelling value proposition despite facing many hurdles from an infrastructure point of view.

The first BlackBerry came out in 1999. The original hardware was a pager style device with a small screen and ran on a very slow Mobitex network. Despite some of these limitations, BlackBerry soon became a hit in the financial community. Hindsight is always 20/20 as they say. But here’s a little bit of history on why RIM became a standout in the wireless e-mail arena whereas many others including Palm (with Palm VII) failed.

Focus on E-mail
RIM focused on a single application with a compelling value proposition – email. They didn’t try to compete with Palm on their terms by building a full fledged PDA style device. They knew that they had a sizable target market of corporate users for whom e-mail access on the go was very important.

Keyboard vs Pen based Input
With the success of the Palm device, an obvious choice would have been to go with a stylus based input. In fact, RIM salespeople had to deal with this objection in the early days. But RIM made the right choice to go with the thumb style keyboard. A stylus is fine for small amounts of data entry but you really need a keyboard to write even a short piece of e-mail. Even the Palm founders eventually abandoned the stylus with the Treo.

Another key hardware innovation that RIM introduced was the trackwheel. It was conveniently located with respect to the keyboard and made navigation through the BlackBerry menu structure very quick and easy.

Push E-mail
Push e-mail was a key RIM innovation (despite the NTP lawsuit) that made the BlackBerry standout from its competitors for a very long time. It was key to its addictive quality since you could engage into an instant messaging style dialog with a colleague thousands of miles away. Push e-mail was also key to hiding the latency of the network and improving the BlackBerry’s battery life. Even though the original Mobitex network was very slow, RIM could deliver e-mail in the background (and that also the first 2K of the message) and then have the device notify the user giving the impression of instantaneous delivery. Also, by using a Push strategy RIM could minimize battery consumption because the device didn’t have to use precious battery checking for e-mail at regular intervals.

Bullet Proof Security
As we all know security is key issue for corporate IT. Without the support of the corporate IT organizations, it would have been very hard for RIM to make any real progress in the enterprise space. Unlike other solutions on the market that utilized simple POP or IMAP interfaces that lacked security, RIM focused on building an enterprise server that provide end-to-end security based on triple DES encryption. Over time, it also introduced many useful administration features that made it fairly easy for corporate IT to control and manage the large number of BlackBerry’s being deployed to throughout their workforce.

All you can eat pricing
While many of the other solutions were based on variable usage based models, RIM made a very smart move by introducing a $40 per month all you can eat model. There were many benefits to this approach. The pricing was simple to understand (you didn’t have to understand MBs), it encouraged high usage and created a very profitable model for RIM that eventually got the wireless carriers interested. The risk for RIM in implementing an all you can eat model was fairly low given that they utilized data bandwidth very efficiently (by downloading only portions of your e-mail or attachments).

Of course, early success is no guarantee of long-term success. Will BlackBerry continue to be leader in the future given all the new competition in the market? Let me know your thoughts.