Posted: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:21 PM - 8,212 Readers

By: Cary Peele

"Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, it might have been." (Faulkner)

The year is 1999, Research in Motion (RIM) reports, "Partnerships were a major theme for the third quarter… New distribution relationships for BlackBerry were established with Dell Computer…” And FundingUniverse.com reported, “RIM signed a distribution agreement with Dell Computer whereby Dell account executives would sell BlackBerry devices to large corporate accounts. News of the distribution agreement helped boost RIM's stock price to more than C$80 per share by the end of 1999, up from C$46.20 on November 1."

Do you or anyone you know have a Dell branded Blackberry? No, you don’t because at a 1999 Dell quarterly product review meeting the project was axed!

Here’s how it went down:
While celebrating Latitude’s $5 billion in sales milestone on a open air party boat (sans cerveza) cruising down Lake Austin on a hot, humid August evening in 1998 I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Dell and then being assigned to a team of four investigating RIM and their Blackberry PDA. This appeared to be something Michael was keenly interested in.

After arriving in Canada and getting lost in a blinding snowstorm we finally made it to Waterloo and met Jim Balsillie’s crew. Friendly, personable and obviously interested in partnering with the mighty Dell, they proudly gave us a tour of their manufacturing plant and sent us home with 4 Blackberries. I was immediately hooked! It was cool, slick, easy to use, and it always worked! Best of all, I could delete unnecessary emails as soon as I received them, thereby keeping my inbox uncluttered.

Back in Austin I showed the device to our engineers, one of whom, to my utter dismay, proceeded to take a screw driver out of his pocket and dismantle the device on the conference room table! Everyone at the table remarked about the simplicity inside the form factor. To my delight, when he reassembled the device there were no spare parts and it still worked!

So we were off and running. We made a plan, we studied the financials, we began the branding, pricing and even sales training. We loved our Blackberries and we knew millions of others were going to love them too.

The quarterly product review meeting was fast approaching as we energetically agonized over the PowerPoint presentation. We edited, we scrubbed, we re-re-reviewed the financials. Even with our conservative estimates, it presented as a no-brainer. (Hindsight and history have proven this so in multiples!)

John, our team leader, went into the meeting a bit nervous but confident and prepared, armed with financials that only grew over time. This was no flash-in-the-pan, short-term, get-rich-quick, and get out deal. This was luscious and long-term. We were confident John would get the green light and the rest would be history. We waited anxiously for John to emerge from the review meeting, all the while thinking of places to take our small triumphant team to celebrate and plan our next tactical move. After all, there was much to be done to actually launch a product at Dell.

But, when John emerged he was a shaken man, ashen-white and fuming. Something went terribly wrong. John said “that’s it, I @&#!* quit.” My first thought was that they didn’t like the numbers; maybe we’d have to redo them, a minor delay. But no, John told the team that the program had been canceled, game over. “Dell doesn’t do handhelds” he was told by the co-CEO. And that was it, John never got past slide one of our presentation.

In 2009 Dell entered “the mobile device business” thereby making it “a late entrant into a smartphone market dominated by companies like Nokia, Apple, Samsung, Research In Motion and LG Electronics.”

Today, Rim is trading at USD $60 and Dell is at $13. There are millions of Blackberries being used today and more being sold as you read this.

Oh, what might have been...

*  Story Contributed by: Cary Peele