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So If Mccain Didnt Invent The Blackberry Who Did

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by Kevin Maney
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First Bytes: Samsung/Sandisk, Best Buy, Microsoft   Jeff Bewkes, Financial Genius

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Sep 17 2008 8:57am EDT

So If McCain Didn't Invent the BlackBerry, Who Did?

Kevin Maney writes: I invented Google!


No, wait -- that's a joke. JOKE! Funny. Ha. Just trying out for a spot on John McCain's campaign staff.

Yes, so the McCain campaign's "joke" about McCain inventing the BlackBerry totally backfired. Obviously, the Republican presidential nominee did not invent any such thing. But then, who did? Certainly NOT the folks at Research In Motion, the company that now makes the BlackBerry. It already settled a patent-infringement lawsuit for $613 million with an entity called NTP. And, actually, NTP apparently wasn't first. A guy named Geoff Goodfellow might have first described wireless e-mail back in 1982.

Motorola even beat RIM to wireless e-mail, introducing the PageWriter -- a gadget that looked like a tiny laptop -- in 1996. I remember trying one, and it worked terribly, which is probably why Motorola never became the wireless e-mail king. Two years later, RIM came out with its first device -- a tiny text-based pager-like thing called the BlackBerry 850. When PC Magazine named its 50 greatest gadgets of the past 50 years, it listed the PageWriter just ahead of the BlackBerry 850.

Yeah, so, lots of people invented wireless e-mail, but certainly none of them were elected officials.

Meanwhile, McCain advisor Carly Fiorina gaffed by saying neither McCain nor Sarah Palin (nor, for that matter, Barack Obama) has the experience to run a major company. Considering that Fiorina was tossed from H-P after creating internal chaos by turning the company's culture upside-down...who is she to say?

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