Simon

"It is reported that their reputation for honesty is so great that all of San Francisco knows that one can come without fear to store their bags of gold with the Lazards. Many pioneers also got into the habit of entrusting them to transfer their treasure to New York, or even to Europe. Simon reportedly slept on the precious bags he was transporting across the United States, rifle in hand..."

"A more helpful insight came from a participant who spent much of his professional life on the road. He approached with dread his evening hotel ritual of downloading the day’s flood of e-mails on his laptop. It was a chore that inevitably involved hours of reading and replying. “If I just had a tool to help me with my volume of e-mail on the road, I’d pay anything,” he said. Convenience, not urgency, was a more potent marketing pitch. This was a device that could free customers to catch up on office communications on their terms. Idle time between meetings or lost time in taxis and airport lounges could be productively spent processing e-mails. Employers would be able to reach staff any time of the day and employees would not have to be tethered to computers. Bosses would never know e-mails were coming from baseball games, the golf course, or family homes. The next step was positioning the service in the crowded technology market. Lazaridis was so captivated by the concept he argued RIM should sell the Leapfrog as a new product category: e-mail pagers. Castell and RIM’s marketing vice president, Dave Werezak, disagreed. Too many other innovative communicators, such as IBM’s Simon or the EO Personal Communicator, had failed in part because they tried to define new categories and consumers didn’t appreciate or understand what the products offered. RIM managers were influenced by management guru Geoffrey Moore, who argued in his influential book Inside the Tornado that innovative technologies had a better chance of success if sold within a proven product category.1 The most popular handheld device going in 1998 was the Palm Pilot, sold as a personal digital assistant, or PDA. Palm Pilot was a huge hit because it allowed busy professionals to easily store and update calendar and contact information on a pocket-sized device. If the e-mail-enabled Leapfrog came with calendar and contact applications, Castell urged Lazaridis, then RIM could position its product as the most comprehensive PDA on the market. Lazaridis, who used a Palm, worried RIM would be seen as a weakling against the Silicon Valley darling. Castell’s pitch, however, was compelling: “If you want addresses and calendar, go for Palm. If e-mail is important, we’re the PDA to choose.” Lazaridis was swayed. His busy engineers were handed another impossibly short deadline to add calendar and contact applications to the device."