Pricing for the Blackberry 950 started at $399 US with a flat monthly rate of $39.99. Canadian users had to $549 for the device and a flat monthly rate of $49.99 to $62.99. A BES license would set you back for $2999 US which included 20 user license, if you wanted more you would have to pay $490 for 10 more user license. Compare that today where RIM is giving out Blackberry like candy, these days you can fly with United and get a Blackberry, and how about renting a car, buying some pants, or ordering pizza.
In 1999 you also had only one choice if you wanted a Blackberry, the Blackberry 950 which had a monochrome screen, Intel386 processor with 2MB of RAM. Compare that with the models of today, the newer Blackberrys like the 7250, 7290, 7100 have a vibrant color display, much faster processor, and 32MB of RAM. Not to mention that data networks like Mobitex that the 950 worked on were a lot slower than today’s GPRS speed but that didn’t so much matter because there was no web access, RSS readers, or Instant Messaging programs for the 950.
Carrier choice was pretty much non-existent in 1999. If you wanted a Blackberry your only choice would be Mobitex. Now nearly all the Canadian and US carriers will sell Blackberrys and dozens of others world wide.
Now probably the most amazing feat for RIM is the financial company growth. For Q2 results in 1999 they posted a revenue of 28.7 million which sounded impressive compared to 1998 Q2 result of 8.4 but is peanuts compared to this year’s 453 million for Q1. No subscription numbers were given but if you figure a monthly subscription rate of $49.99 and revenue of 28.7 million that would give you a subscription base of 585,000. However, this doesn’t even factor in hardware and licensing sales which account for about 70% of RIM’s current revenue. So if we give a conservative percentage of 60% for hardware and BES licensing revenue share that would give us 11.5 million of revenue generated from subscription. When we rework the numbers it gives us a subscription base of 230,000 users which is probably fairly high but we would probably never know. Compare that with today’s 3.11 million subscribers we can just see the mind boggling success of the Blackberry device. That’s nearly 500,000 new Blackberry users a year.
Hopefully RIM continues with its rate of success and in another 5 years we can revisit RIM and laugh at 3.11 million subscribers. We hope you enjoy reading our history piece of RIM as much as we had writing and researching. We would love to hear any early experience of early Blackberry adopters …
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