story of research in motion

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BlackBerry: History vs. Hollywood

When was research in motion founded.

The true story reveals that the company that made the BlackBerry smartphone, Research in Motion (RIM), was founded by childhood friends Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin in 1984. They were both engineering students at the time, Mike at the University of Waterloo and Doug at the University of Windsor. One of RIM's early devices was a bulky digital advertising device called the Budgie, which never took off. For a time, they made circuit boards for factory equipment and computerized digital display boards for General Motors Corp. RIM won Oscar and Emmy technical awards for their automated barcode readers for film-editing machines. Eventually, RIM focused on the development of connectivity technology, including modems and pagers. -Losing the Signal Research in Motion members Mike Lazaridis, Chris Shaw and Doug Fregin promote their digital advertising device the Budgie at a shopping mall in 1984. Photo: University of Waterloo Archives

Where did the real-life story of the BlackBerry take place?

Like in the movie, the rise and fall of the Canadian company Research in Motion unfolded in Waterloo, Ontario.

Did Doug Fregin wear headbands?

No. As elaborated on in the next question, a BlackBerry fact-check reveals that Matt Johnson's character in the movie bears no resemblance to the real Doug Fregin, who never wore tank tops and headbands to the office.

Does BlackBerry portray Doug Fregin accurately?

No. Director and co-star Matt Johnson, who portrays Doug Fregin in the film, said that he is a "true cipher," pointing out that Fregin has never sat down for a recorded interview. Instead of drawing from what little he knew about the real Fregin, Johnson instead portrayed Fregin as a "kind of mascot figure who is tying the culture of the office together." Johnson claims that his portrayal of Fregin is partially based on Matthias Wandel, another of RIM's early employees ( The Associated Press ). Wandel worked at the company from 1993 to 2007. Johnson had discussed RIM's history with Wandel, who even offered diaries that he kept as they developed the BlackBerry smartphone. Still, this didn't stop Wandel from releasing a YouTube video where he points out the BlackBerry movie's inaccuracies, at least the ones he observed in the film's trailer. This includes the movie's wildly inaccurate depiction of Doug Fregin. "First thought [upon seeing the trailer], this guy was just a fictional character," Wandel said, until he then heard him being referred to by the name Doug. "This guy, both in appearance, and speech, and temperament, bears NO resemblance to the actual Doug Fregin. This guy, as far as I'm concerned, is a fictional character." Unlike what Johnson stated, Wandel apparently saw no resemblance to himself in the character either. The real Doug Fregin (left) was nothing like Matt Johnson's character in the movie (right).

Was movie night a custom during the early days at Research in Motion?

In the film, Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson) is the organizer of movie nights at the RIM office. The walls of the office are also adorned with movie posters. The book that provided the foundation for the movie, Losing the Signal , doesn't mention movie nights at the office or movie posters, but it does state that movies were one of Mike Lazaridis' hobbies and that he eventually had an impressive home theater. It also mentions that Jim Balsillie was a fan of James Bond. According to director Matt Johnson, he drew inspiration from his own understanding of 1990s pop culture. In recreating Mike and Doug's journey in the film, he was also inspired by his own journey as a young filmmaker. It seems likely that movie nights are more a nod to Johnson's own love of film, as well as the playful atmosphere at the RIM offices in the early days, rather than something that actually happened in real life.

Had Jim Balsillie never seen Star Wars ?

In researching the BlackBerry true story, we learned that this is an entirely fictional moment that was inserted in the film to separate the geeks from their potential new partner, who is depicted as an outsider in their world. Former RIM employee Matthias Wandel shook his head at the film's assertion that Jim Balsillie never saw Star Wars. "Jim not knowing about Star Wars, oh God. Jim is way more worldly than that," said Wandel in a YouTube video critiquing the film's trailer. "He would be much more familiar with pop culture than to not know about Star Wars. And that reference to Star Wars [in the movie], people didn't talk like that at RIM. It wasn't like that at all."

Is Jim Balsillie portrayed accurately in BlackBerry ?

No. The real Jim Balsillie has seen the movie twice and said that Glenn Howerton's character is almost unrecognizable to him. In the movie, Balsillie is depicted as a foul-mouthed tyrant who throws temper tantrums and, at the same time, steers the company down the road to success, plowing through anything that gets in his way. "I'm aggressive. I'm competitive. I'm ambitious. I own that," said Balsillie, but the film exaggerates it to the point of satire, he noted. "When I first saw it, I was confused for about five minutes. And then I thought, 'OK, we're being roasted here.' ... They're taking an element of truth, who I am, and they're playing with it." The real Jim Balsillie (left) was less extreme and more likable than Glenn Howerton's character (right). Another former RIM employee has commented on Balsillie's portrayal in the film. "This guy is much more portrayed the shark than he really was," says Matthias Wandel, who worked at RIM from 1993 to 2007. "He was much more likable than [Glenn Howerton's character]. Of course, being likable makes him much more effective at business, and he was good at that. ... He's being portrayed perhaps a bit too harshly." Wandel did note that Balsillie could unleash a verbal barrage if he felt insulted, "but for the most part, he was quite likable in terms of normal interactions." -Matthias Random Stuff YouTube Of the three key BlackBerry players, Jim Balsillie is the only one who attended the premiere of the movie and sat for a private screening. Former RIM co-founder/co-CEO Mike Lazaridis and co-founder Doug Fregin did not to attend and have yet to see the film. "They're having a lark with us," said Balsillie of the filmmakers. "Lighten up, everybody. It's a movie."  -The Canadian Press

Is RIM co-founder Mike Lazaridis depicted accurately in the BlackBerry movie?

"He doesn't really look like that," says former employee Matthias Wandel of Jay Baruchel's character. "He was much more roundish. He's of Greek origin, not at all like this guy." -Matthias Random Stuff Pictured above is the real Mike Lazarids (left) in 1985 and actor Jay Baruchel (right) as Lazaridis in the movie. Photo: University of Waterloo Archives / IFC Films

Did they go to a pitch meeting with a hastily-whipped-together BlackBerry demo device?

In analyzing the BlackBerry fact vs. fiction, we learned that the demo in the movie was indeed inspired by a real 1996 pitch meeting that they attended. However, the pre-BlackBerry email device that they demoed in real life was far more polished than the hastily-put-together device in the movie. "The device that was shown was an email device with a flip-top lid and QWERTY keyboard. It didn't remotely resemble [the device in the movie]," said former RIM employee Matthias Wandel. However, it is true that some of the employees pulled an all-nighter to get the device ready, and it did have some last-minute issues that needed to be fixed on the day of the presentation. The movie's version of the device and the actual demo device are displayed below. The demo device shown in the movie (left) looks far more unpolished than the real-life device that was demoed (right). Referring to the slapped-together device in the movie and its exposed wires, Wandel noted, "Mike Lazaridis wouldn't have been caught dead showing something like that, like, so unprofessional. Mike was very much about being professional. He was very much not the stereotype of the Silicon Valley startup, but that's not the story they want to portray. They want to sort of portray it like the exciting sort of startup thing from the late 1990s, like all these startups were supposed to be like. I don't know what they really were like because I wasn't part of one. I was just part of RIM, but I can tell you, RIM was not like that." Despite the real device not resembling the pieced-together one in the movie, it's true that it was barely functional. "The product just barely worked," said Wandel. "Mike was very pleased that it did work for the demo, because we all knew it was very flakey, and the deal got made and it was great." Wandel pointed out that unlike what the Jim Balsillie character states at the meeting in the movie, they weren't calling it by the name BlackBerry at that point. The name BlackBerry didn't get coined until a few years later. -Matthias Random Stuff YouTube

Were BlackBerry smartphones focused on email?

Yes. BlackBerrys were a business-centric phone that became wildly popular due to the small keyboard underneath the screen and its ability to handle email. "What RIM did with the BlackBerry, it integrated with the corporate email servers," noted former RIM engineer Matthias Wandel, "so if your company had a BlackBerry server connected to their email server, that would then go out through the Internet and then go over Mobitext and enter your BlackBerry, and it would seem like it was just part of your PC's inbox, in that if you sent from it, it was sent from your PC and it would be in your outbox. So to have a really good email integration, that was RIM's thing at the time." -Matthias Random Stuff YouTube Despite the BlackBerry's keys being too small for your fingers, it was still better than typing characters by cycling through the letters assigned to each number on a cell phone's numeric keypad. In conjunction with email, RIM, the company behind the BlackBerry, focused largely on the security and connectivity requirements of its enterprise customers. The company's reluctance to shift its focus from this sector of the market would eventually contribute to its downfall.

When did the first BlackBerry come out?

For six years, Research in Motion (RIM) had sold two-way pagers. In exploring the BlackBerry true story, we discovered that the first RIM device to carry the name BlackBerry was the BlackBerry 850, released in 1999 as a two-way pager and email device. PC Magazine argues that the first true BlackBerry was the BlackBerry 957 (and its brother the 950), which introduced many of the user interface elements and icons that would last through the next decade. The 957, which was released in 2000, was equipped with the ability to access the Internet and functionality for push email. However, these devices weren't yet smartphones. That would come in 2002 with the release of the BlackBerry 5810, which still lacked an integrated microphone and required users to wear a headset. The following year saw the release of RIM's first true smartphone, the BlackBerry 7230. RIM thrived for the next six years and the BlackBerry brand dominated the smartphone market from 2005 to 2009. Pictured above are the first RIM devices to carry the name BlackBerry, including the BlackBerry 7230, the first RIM smartphone.

Where did the name BlackBerry come from?

While researching the question, "How accurate is BlackBerry ?" we learned that, originally, the executives at Research in Motion (RIM) were planning to call their new email device, which was not yet a phone, "PocketLink" or "MegaMail." Employees at a marketing agency called Lexicon came up with the name "BlackBerry," reasoning that the keyboard, with its little buttons, sort of resembled the skin of a fruit. Someone suggested "strawberry," but the name sounded too drawn out for a device that had instantaneous technology. Someone else suggested "blackberry," and the name eventually won out and was a hit with consumers. In the movie, the name is coined several years before it was in real life.  -The New Yorker

Is the BlackBerry movie based on a book?

Yes. BlackBerry extrapolates its story from the 2015 book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff. Unlike similar movies from 2023 that have told the origin stories of pivotal innovations, including Tetris and Air , BlackBerry doesn't end with its namesake innovation heading for the stratosphere. This is a rise-and-fall story, not a rise-and-rise one. Director and co-star Matt Johnson, who portrays Doug Fregin, acknowledged that he took a number of creative liberties that deviate from the book. For instance, he shifted some timelines, based the company culture on his own perspective of the 1990s, and shaped the main characters by infusing them with "our own personalities and our own ideas." Johnson noted that the lawyers prohibited them from inserting anything in the movie that was "an outright fabrication." -Fortune

Did Palm CEO Carl Yankowski threaten a hostile takeover of RIM?

Yes. A BlackBerry fact-check confirms that Carl Yankowski spent months pursuing a takeover of Research in Motion. Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie attended a dinner with him during which they felt like they were the main course. Yankowski, who is portrayed by The Princess Bride 's Cary Elwes in the movie, would constantly try to one-up them as they discussed their personal pursuits and achievements. They began to make things up just to see if Yankowski would take the bait, and he did. Balsillie strung him along for months, keeping the takeover talks with his rival ambiguous. He never intended to agree to a merger unless he was given full executive control of the merged company, a stipulation he knew would never happen. He cut off discussions with Yankowski. -Losing the Signal

Was the BlackBerry dubbed the "CrackBerry" because it was so addictive?

Yes. In researching the question, "Is BlackBerry accurate?" it's true that people became obsessed with clicking away with their thumbs on the phone's tactile keyboard (even if it was too small for your fingers). It became so addictive that, for a period of time, it was nicknamed the "CrackBerry." BlackBerry controlled nearly half of the US cell phone market at its 2008 peak. It was selling over 50 million devices per year with a stock price of $230. Today, the company that was once valued at $85 billion is worth $3 billion, and it controls 0% of the smartphone market. The company's stock price has fallen to the mid-single digits. - Fortune President Obama, perhaps the most famous BlackBerry addict, is pictured with his BlackBerry in its holster on a flight from Paris to Caen, Normandy, France on June 6, 2009.

Did Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin have a falling out?

During infighting reminiscent of the definitive movie of the genre, The Social Network , the company's success causes a fissure to form between Doug and Mike. The latter, portrayed by Jay Baruchel, gradually morphs from a playful nerd into a suit-clad company exec, while Doug (Matt Johnson) longs for the sandbox-style playfulness of the company's early days. While this change in Mike Lazaridis seems somewhat accurate, their rift in the film is mostly fiction. Unlike what's seen in the movie, the real Doug Fregin would not have been disappointed if he wasn't included on a business trip with Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. "That just wasn't his thing," notes Matthias Wandel, a former RIM engineer. "Doug was somebody who liked to be in the background. He got things done. He did CAD work, just he was always doing things that needed to be done, always shying away from the glory, so Doug being sad about not going on some business trip [in the movie], bulls***. Doug would not have wanted to go on a business trip." -Matthias Random Stuff YouTube

Was Mike Lazaridis unwilling to believe that consumers would prefer a keyboard-free device like the iPhone?

This was one of the iPhone's numerous design improvements that allowed it to easily outshine the BlackBerry (the shape of the iPhone was another). In the movie, Mike (Jay Baruchel) is taken by surprise when Apple unveils the iphone, but he brushes it off as a silly toy that will never catch on. Despite Mike's genius, he's unable to recognize how groundbreaking it is to have an iPod, an Internet communicator, and a phone all in one device. Doug (Matt Johnson), on the other hand, recognizes that the company is in jeopardy. This depiction of Mike Lazaridis contradicts the BlackBerry true story. As emphasized in the book Losing the Signal , it was actually Mike who brought the iPhone to Jim Balsillie's attention not long after Steve Jobs took to the stage and unveiled it to the world. Mike recognized it could revolutionize the industry. As a company, RIM mostly ignored the iPhone to focus on fulfilling the demand for BlackBerrys (and also because of the stock backdating scandal and their legal troubles). Several times, the book cites Mike as the one who saw the iPhone's potential and its threat to the BlackBerry, especially after the iPhone's release when Mike got to use one firsthand. It is true that Mike and others at RIM thought the iPhone would fail, but mainly due to it straining AT&T's network and its limited battery life. Pictured is the real Mike Lazarids (left) and actor Jay Baruchel (right) in the movie. Photo: Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

Was Jim Balsillie's desire to buy a hockey team a distraction that contributed to the company's downfall?

No, at least not according to the real Jim Balsillie. While this was indeed a criticism of Balsillie at the time, he says that his desire to bring an NHL team to Hamilton, Ontario did not distract him from his obligations at the company. He told The Canadian Press that he only attended two meetings in three years that pertained to the purchase of the team. He pointed out that his training for long-course triathlons, which he participated in for ten years, took up far more time than his interest in buying a hockey team. "I trained two hours a day and spent 100 times more time on that than I did hockey. But nobody ever wrote an article on that ... When you are prosperous you have lots of different initiatives, everybody does," said Balsillie.

Did the launch of the iPhone in 2007 lead to the BlackBerry's demise?

Yes. My own experience with a BlackBerry is probably similar to the experience many people had when comparing the BlackBerry to the iPhone. Back in 2008, I was looking for a smartphone to replace the traditional cell phone I had through Verizon. I was aware of the BlackBerry and knew that it had been wildly popular. I figured since I could use it to access the Internet, it would be a good choice to use to monitor my websites. I had read about the iPhone, which had launched through AT&T the year prior, but I had never used one. So, I went to Verizon and brought home a BlackBerry, excited to have my first smartphone. While I could see how the keyboard and the small screen beneath it might be good for handling email, the Internet looked miniature and it was slow. A few days later, I was at a birthday party and a friend showed me his new iPhone. I opened its Safari browser to access my websites. The touchscreen was effortless and the Internet looked amazing on the larger screen. I was hooked. It was a no-brainer. A day later, I went back to Verizon to return my BlackBerry. The sales associate told me that BlackBerry would be releasing a touchscreen smartphone similar to the iPhone a few months later called the BlackBerry Storm. I wasn't interested. I went to AT&T and bought an iPhone and have never looked back (although I did switch back to Verizon as a carrier). The hastily-released BlackBerry Storm indeed arrived in stores that November, but it was glitchy and nothing like the iPhone. The BlackBerry Storm is regarded by some as the single biggest disaster in smartphone history ( Losing the Signal ). The touchscreen BlackBerry Storm (right) was RIM's response to Apple's iPhone (left). BlackBerry's decline did not happen overnight. Even in 2010, three years after the release of the iPhone, they still held over 40% of the US market share and nearly 20% of the global market share. Yet, by 2013, they held less than 5% of the US market share ( Harvard.edu ). Their fall was due to several factors, some of which are highlighted in the movie, including the company's slow reactions to the changing market, misunderstanding the key ways a smartphone could be utilized, and poor execution. They focused too long on a device that catered to business people instead of the average fun-seeking consumer.

Did the BlackBerry servers go down in real life?

Yes. This occurred several times and it made the news when it happened.

Did Jim Balsillie become entangled in stock fraud?

No. During our exploration into the BlackBerry fact vs. fiction, we discovered that this is an exaggeration of what actually happened. These scenes are something that Jim Balsillie has taken issue with, pointing out that it never happened that way in real life. It's true that he was involved in a scandal where he and other executives were fined for stock option backdating, a tactic used to enrich the stock options held by employees. In 2009, RIM settled with regulators who described the executives as being negligent in managing the options backdating but pointed out that they did not commit fraud. The RIM executives were required to pay millions in fines. "If you think growing a $20-billion company is designing illegal tax scams and raging f-bombs, there's nothing I can do to help you," Balsillie said of his character's exaggerated actions in the movie. -The Canadian Press

Did the creators of the BlackBerry become extremely wealthy despite their company's nosedive?

Yes. As seen in the BlackBerry movie, despite the company imploding, the co-founders of RIM (Research in Motion) walked away extremely wealthy. Doug Fregin was smart enough to see the writing on the wall as the collapse drew closer. He sold his stock at its peak in 2007 and became one of Canada's wealthiest men. He also resigned as vice president of operations. At one point in 2011, Mike Lazaridis had an estimated net worth of $1.9 billion. However, he held onto his shares and saw his net worth drop significantly as the company floundered. Lazaridis sold $26.5 million in shares in December 2013, lowering his stake in the company to less than 5%. He also stepped down as CEO.

Does BlackBerry still exist?

Yes. However, the answer to, "Does BlackBerry still make smartphones?" is no, they don't make smartphones anymore. Like in the movie, the story of BlackBerry is about someone who came up with a great idea, and after a significant amount of success, was eventually eclipsed by an even greater idea (the iPhone). In 2013, John S. Chen took over as CEO and Research in Motion (RIM) officially changed its name to BlackBerry Limited, piggybacking off the familiarity of the company's best-known product. Since 2013, BlackBerry has been focused on cybersecurity and software. According to the company's website, BlackBerry is now "a software company focused on providing enabling technologies to ensure the safety and security of all the devices and systems businesses rely on. We are pioneers in cybersecurity, encrypted voice and digital communications, automotive safety, and innumerable connected and IoT systems and devices in fields such as medical, industrial, avionics and more—all with the common thread of intelligent security."

Overall, how accurate is BlackBerry ?

The filmmakers have livened up the story of BlackBerry with the excitement that is often associated with Silicon Valley startups of the late 1990s. However, as noted in the movie, the real-life story of BlackBerry unfolded in Waterloo, Ontario, and as former employees have stated, it was nothing like a traditional Silicon Valley startup. The movie's biggest inaccuracies lie in its depiction of the main characters, especially Doug Fregin, who bears almost no resemblance to the real-life RIM co-founder, both in terms of appearance and personality. Glenn Howerton's character, Jim Balsillie, is an over-the-top version of the real co-CEO, who was less of a pitbull and far more likable and worldly in real life (him being unfamiliar with Star Wars is fiction). In an interview with Den of Geek , director Matt Johnson said that he never spoke to the real Mike Lazaridis or Jim Balsillie, and in an interview with The Canadian Press , he indicated that he hadn't been in touch with the reclusive Doug Fregin either, the individual he portrays in the film. There is some forgivable shifting of timelines, including the device being given the name BlackBerry much earlier than in real life. As a former employee pointed out, the movie also gets some technical details incorrect, but most people outside of the industry won't pick up on them. In the end, like other films in its genre, BlackBerry will leave you with a good understanding of the company's rise-and-fall story, even if the movie's version feels like it was injected with steroids.

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History of BlackBerry

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BlackBerry: A Story of Constant Success and Failure

BlackBerry Limited ( BB ), known as Research in Motion (RIM) until January 2013, has a long history of extreme success and failure. It’s credited by many as creating the first smartphone. And at its peak in September 2011, there were 85 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide.

But the rise of Google’s Android platform and Apple’s iOS caused it to decline in popularity by nearly three-quarters. BlackBerry’s stock price effectively tanked from highs of $147 to around $3 as of April 2024.

How did a high-flying revolutionary tech company get eclipsed so badly? A movie, released in Canada in May 2023, told the tale.

Key Takeaways

• BlackBerry pioneered handheld devices but has lost market share to larger rivals like Apple.
• The company, formerly known as Research in Motion, grew by leaps and bounds from 1999 to 2007, as its innovative product lines were well received.
• The launch of the touchscreen iPhone in 2007 triggered a dramatic shift away from BlackBerry handheld devices.
• Hopes for a turnaround have been dashed as the company grapples with intense competition from larger technology companies.
• BlackBerry has lost more than half of its market value in two years.
• “BlackBerry,” a movie about the company’s founders, premiered in Canada on May 12, 2023.

The pioneer in bringing email services to handheld mobiles, with its trademark QWERTY keyboard, BlackBerry became an instant darling of world leaders, corporate honchos, and the rich and famous alike. Indeed, owning a BlackBerry device was once a status symbol , and  BlackBerry addiction was a prevalent condition.

The always-on, always-connected wireless world that allowed secure and reliable access to emails turned out to be very useful for businesses. The first prominent release from BlackBerry, the Inter@ctive Pager 950, was in 1998.  It had a small-sized screen, keyboard buttons, and the iconic trackball that allowed seamless syncing and continuous access to corporate emails. It became an instant hit, and then there was no looking back.

In 1999, the company introduced the 850 pager, which supported “push email” from the Microsoft Corp. ( MSFT ) exchange server, and in 2000, BlackBerry launched the first smartphone, called the BlackBerry 957.

Attributed to increased use by enterprises and governments, RIM’s revenues grew by leaps and bounds from 1999 to 2001. The company continued to expand functionality in the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) and BlackBerry OS. The golden period of 2001 to 2007 saw BlackBerry’s global expansion and the addition of new products to its portfolio. After successfully gaining a foothold in the enterprise market, BlackBerry expanded into the consumer market. The BlackBerry Pearl series was very successful, and subsequent releases of the Curve and Bold product lines were well received.

“BlackBerry,” the movie, tells the story of the founders who created the world’s first smartphone. The satirical history is loosely based on the book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry,” by Sean Silcoff and Jacquie McNish. It premiered in Canada on May 12, 2023.

BlackBerry’s stock price peaked at an all-time high of $147 in mid-2008. A year earlier, Apple Inc. ( AAPL ) introduced its iPhone—the first prominent touchscreen phone. BlackBerry ignored it initially, perceiving it to be an enhanced mobile phone with playful features targeted at younger consumers. However, iPhone was a huge hit—and this was the start of BlackBerry’s demise.

Not just aimed at individuals, the iPhone managed to attract business leaders, penetrating BlackBerry’s core market, which was soon flooded with many similar email-enabled smartphones from other manufacturers. Yet, BlackBerry managed to maintain its status as a “business email device.” People used to carry two phones: a BlackBerry for business and another personal phone.

BlackBerry introduced Storm in 2008, its first touchscreen phone to compete with the iPhone. But after high initial sales, complaints started pouring in about the device’s performance. This was the first time that investors, analysts , and the media started to worry about the business prospects of BlackBerry.

In 2009, RIM secured first place in Fortune’s 100 fastest-growing companies. In September 2010, Comscore reported RIM having the largest market share (37.3%) in the U.S. smartphone market. Its global user base stood at 41 million subscribers. Unfortunately, that was the peak of market penetration for RIM in the United States. After that, the company continued to lose ground to rival operating systems—the Apple iOS and Google’s ( GOOG ) Android —and was never able to make it back.

By November 2012, BlackBerry’s U.S. market share had dropped to just 7.3%, with Google and Apple claiming 53.7% and 35%, respectively. Despite declining U.S. sales, BlackBerry continued to have success globally. It reported 77 million users globally during the last quarter of 2012, demonstrating its success in global expansion.

Owing to these local losses vs. global success, the stock displayed high volatility . The worst year was 2011, as BlackBerry’s stock price tanked around 80% amid declining market share. Continued earnings losses resulted in further declines—most prominently the first-quarter loss in 2014 of $84 million, which led to a roughly 30% decline in the share price on the day after the announcement.

The high volatility in the stock is attributed to several comeback attempts, corporate developments, associated recommendations by analysts, and competitor developments. In April 2010, RIM acquired the real-time operating system QNX, which formed the basis of the BlackBerry Tablet OS. The BlackBerry Playbook tablet was introduced on the QNX platform. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a total failure due to its high price, limited features, and poor performance.

The next generation of BlackBerry phones were announced in 2011, but the eventual product—the BlackBerry 10— failed to catch on . Nonetheless, based on interim forecasts that the BlackBerry 10 would surpass sales predictions, the company’s stock saw an upswing of 14% in November 2012. By January 2013, the stock had risen around 50%, and the volatility continued.

Wide positive swings to the tune of +35% were observed a couple of times during the first half of 2014. Those were based on announcements of BlackBerry transforming from mobile devices to a mobile solutions company. Those plans yielded less-than-meaningful results.

Another swing came in January 2015, when it was reported that Samsung was interested in buying BlackBerry. This led to a 30% spike in the latter’s share price . However, the jump proved to be a short-term blip, as the stock resumed a downtrend through 2015 and 2016.

Enterprise software sales represent almost half of BlackBerry’s revenue in 2020.

Hopes for a dramatic turnaround at BlackBerry have been dashed repeatedly. The stock rallied to a closing high of $12.66 in early 2018—almost doubling value after two years of gains. Since then, however, the stock has lost more than half of its market value , as the company’s mobile business has been decimated by the competition and it has been forced to shift its focus its efforts toward other segments like enterprise software.

In its current iteration, BlackBerry Limited is a provider of cybersecurity and Internet of Things (IoT) services, having effectively given up on smartphones as a business. On April 3, 2024, the company issued fiscal year (FY) 2024 total revenue of $853 million, with IoT revenue of $815 million and cybersecurity revenue of $280 million. Q4 fiscal 2024 revenue for the company’s IoT business showed 25% year-over-year (YOY) revenue growth, according to BlackBerry.

It is possible, often even necessary, for a technology company to change its stripes. Google and Meta (formerly Facebook) ( META ) have blazed trails in that arena. BlackBerry, however, will not only have to morph but will also have to overcome its reputation as a failed smartphone maker. Time, as they say, will tell whether BlackBerry is up to these tasks. Stay tuned.

What Business Is BlackBerry in Now That It Has Stopped Making Smartphones?

Currently, BlackBerry Limited is primarily a provider of cybersecurity and Internet of Things (IoT) services. The company recently reported FY2024 total revenue of $853 million.

Why Did BlackBerry Smartphones Fail?

Competition, in a nutshell. The introduction of the Apple iPhone, which BlackBerry didn’t take seriously, caused a loss of market share that BlackBerry couldn’t recover from. More competitors entered the smartphone space, eventually crowding BlackBerry out.

When Was the BlackBerry Movie Out?

“BlackBerry,” which premiered across Canada on May 12, 2023, told the story of the three men who took an idea and turned it into the world’s first smartphone. The movie, described as more satire than history, is loosely based on the 2015 book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry.”

BlackBerry is an example of the big risks associated with the highly dynamic technology sector . None of the industry rankings, predictions, or recommendations seems to fit the BlackBerry stock play. Long-term investors have been burned, while only a few traders may have made money on the wide swings. Unless confirmed news of solid acquisition or partnership comes in, this stock will likely remain a pure trader ’s play.

BGR. “ BlackBerry Lost 4 Million Subscribers in Q1 Despite New Launches .”

Yahoo! Finance. “ BlackBerry Limited (BB): Summary .”

The Canadian Encyclopedia. “ Blackberry Limited .”

York University Computer Museum. “ Research in Motion Inter@ctive 950 Pager .”

National Museum of American History. “ Blackberry .”

Global News. “ ‘BlackBerry’ Filmmakers Toe the Line Between Fact and Fiction .”

Macrotrends. “ BlackBerry—25-Year Stock Price History | BB .”

Comscore. “ Comscore Reports September 2010 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share .”

AnnualReports.com. “ RIM 2010 ,” Page 4 of PDF.

Comscore. “ Comscore Reports February 2013 U.S. Smartphone Subscriber Market Share .”

AnnualReports.com. “ Research in Motion Limited, Form 40-F ,” Page 7 (Page 14 of PDF).

Yahoo! Finance. “ BlackBerry Limited (BB): Historical Data .”

BlackBerry, via Internet Archive Wayback Machine. “ BlackBerry Reports First Quarter Fiscal 2014 Results ,” Page 1.

BlackBerry. “ BlackBerry Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2024 Results .”

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The untold story of BlackBerry: New film details the spectacular rise and epic fall of the world’s first smartphone

Production has wrapped on BlackBerry, a new film that examines the rise and fall of the iPhone precursor and Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind it.

Based on the 2015 book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry , by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, the film will star Jay Baruchel ( This Is The End ) and Glenn Howerton ( It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia ). They are expected to star as executives Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie.

While production is complete, the film does not yet have a distributor. Financiers will look for buyers at the Toronto International Film Festival next month.

BlackBerry became wildly popular in the 2000s, earning the infamous nickname “Crackberry.” The device’s ability to combine phone services with email and text messaging was, at the time, revolutionary and paved the way for the iPhone, Android, and other smartphones. It was a technological giant that emerged from a largely unknown province in Ontario.

Business leaders and celebrities were equally infatuated. And in 2009, Fortune named it the world’s fastest growing company , with earnings per share expanding at a three-year annual growth rate of 84%.

Three years later, though, it was circling the drain . Its stock was just 10% of where it was in 2008.

The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 was the tidal shift for the company. RIM (and Balsillie and Lazaridis) shrugged off the threat, focusing on its enterprise customers. But as iPhone and Android began to appeal to everyday customers with well-designed, well-stocked app stores, RIM fell out of favor—fast.

Management, though, remained in denial, launching a poorly received iPad competitor called the PlayBook and pinning all their hopes on the BlackBerry 10 , which also flopped. And a 2011 network failure that shut off email access for millions of users was one of the final straws.

Today, the company is led by CEO John Chen. It has long since shifted into connected car technology and cybersecurity, leaving its phone history behind it.

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A History of Research In Motion - part 1

The future of Research In Motion hangs in the balance. It is the early summer of 1997, and Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie stand in a BellSouth conference room. They've spent the last few years trying to convince the world that mobile email is the future. They're almost there. RIM has already produced one device, the Inter@ctive Pager 900; and is developing a second - sometimes called the Leapfrog.

But BellSouth - the one and only customer for RIM's soon-to-be Leapfrog - isn't happy. They've spent $300 million to buy and build the Mobitex wireless network. But without products to make use of that network, BellSouth finds itself with an unprofitable enterprise. If BellSouth goes through with plans to sell the network, RIM loses its Leapfrog network and the only customer for the device.

RIM Co-CEO's Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie have but one chance to change the minds of the high-level executives in that room. The executives "walked in there thinking they were going to pull the plug," says Jim Hobbs, VP Operations, BellSouth Mobile Data. As Lazaridis begins the presentation that will decide the future of his fledgling company, he comes to a horrid realization. He and Balsillie had been so nervous about the meeting that they had left the models of the Leapfrog in their taxi. It was a make-it or break-it presentation, and the most important parts were lost.

In the Halls of the University

In the early days of Research In Motion, when the company had but one building near the University of Waterloo and funds for only one sign, Lazaridis insisted that it be installed facing towards the university on the back of the building. Said Lazaridis, "I don't really care if anyone else knows where the building is. All I want is the students to know where the building is."

It is no coincidence that Research In Motion sits just off-campus from the University of Waterloo. It is there that the story of the company begins. Mike Lazaridis, long a tinkerer of all things electrical, enrolled in the University in the fall of 1980. Lazaridis learned much, enrolling in electrical engineering and computer science classes. As part of his studies, Lazaridis worked with Control Data Corporation; building some of the most advanced computers of the time.

As Lazaridis neared the end of his fourth year at the University of Waterloo, graduation seemed less and less important. Along with his childhood chum and co-founder of RIM, Doug Fregin, Lazaridis was already hard at work building his first product - a device for displaying information "cards" on a television screen. Called Budgie, it was high-tech for the time.

Ready to truly start his new business, Lazaridis decided to take two-year leave of his studies. Before he could do so, Lazaridis was first required to gain personal permission from the president of the university. Doug Wright listened to the enthusiastic young entrepreneur as he explained his business plan. "I have to do this," replied the president, "I have to try and dissuade you...but speaking personally, just between you and me, go for it."

Poetry in Motion

Now the new company needed a name. Paradigm Research was the first choice to be registered, but that name was taken. Lazaridis tried submitting different variations of words combined with "Research," but each was rejected. As the registration application had to be accompanied by a $160 fee, the company was fast losing money before it even had a name. One evening, as Lazaridis was channel-surfing, he happened upon a bit of serendipity. A news story about football players taking ballet lessons. Footage of players dancing nimbly around the opposition accompanied the words on screen: "Poetry in Motion." Lazaridis submitted the name, and Research In Motion was officially incorporated on March 7, 1984.

The company's first product, the Budgie, was anything but a commercial success. Of the 100 that were manufactured, less than half were sold. But RIM did gain a bit of credibility and knowledge with the project. Soon, the company had a contract to design and build an LED notification system for use on General Motors' assembly line. It would be the royalties from this system that kept RIM afloat in those early times.

While designing that CDS-100 system, RIM acquired its first employee. Lazaridis and Doug Fregin hired Michael Barnstijn, recently graduated from the University of Waterloo, for the princely sum of $400 a month. Though his résumé was impressive, it was his cover letter done in calligraphy that caught the attention of the co-founders. Barnstijn turned out to be a wizard with computer code, finding and fixing bugs that were causing the entire system to crash.

Working Hard for the Money

RIM continued to find what might be considered odd-jobs. IBM wanted a local area network designed and built for them. A dentist wanted a toothbrush that knew how hard you were brushing. The National Film Board of Canada wanted a new system for synchronizing film editing. The system they built won an Academy Award in 1998.

In 1989, Rogers - the Canadian telephone company - had a wireless network with nothing to do. Outside of Sweden, only Rogers carried the new Mobitex network, designed for mobile messaging. After hearing about RIM - during a job interview, no less - Rogers contacted the company to see what RIM could do.

It would be their first big break into the wireless data world. With the knowledge gained from this contract, RIM began to understand wireless and radios like no one else. It is said that at times, RIM knew more about the Mobitex network than the manufacturer did. In later years, RIM convinced Ericsson to let them tweak the network settings, resulting in a huge increase in efficiency.

With all these great technological leaps, Lazaridis realized he had a problem. Though he had a firm grasp on the technology behind the brand, he desperately needed someone to help with the business side. Someone to "run the numbers." Someone to build partnerships. Someone named Jim Balsillie.

An Unusual Partnership

1990 marked the first year RIM made $1 million in revenue. It was then that one of RIM's customers wanted to buy more than just parts. Sutherland-Shultz was in negotiations to buy RIM; Jim Balsillie was brought in to be Sutherland-Shultz's closer.  Though RIM passed on the offer, Lazaridis did not pass on Balsillie.  Throughout the tense negotiations, he came to respect Balsillie. Lazaridis needed help with RIM and offered to Balsillie a partnership in the company.  Balsillie said no.  

It wasn't long before he changed his mind. Soon Vice President of Finance Jim Balsillie became Co-Chief Executive Officer Jim Balsillie. Few companies decide to use the Co-CEO dynamic. Some have had limited success with it; others have failed horribly. For Research In Motion, it just worked. Balsillie supported Lazaridis' business decisions, and Balsillie learned of technology from Lazaridis. As Balsillie says, "I know I'm just a parrot, but I'm a very good parrot."

It was around this time that Lazaridis decided to give his company a new direction. Though the RIM had success at creating one-off products, Lazaridis saw that the future was data without wires. RIM began to work on building new wireless radios from the ground up.

Do You Have Email?

It may seem strange to think of it, but in 1994; the question wasn't, "What's your email address?" It was "do you have e-mail?" Few individuals had email addresses; some corporations, universities, and salesmen had them, but few individuals. Even at this early time, Lazaridis recognized the potential of email as a communication tool. Even more so, Lazaridis envisioned email in the palm of your hand.

But there were problems. RIM had the knowledge, but the innards of the prototype device were much too big to be of use to anyone. The circuit boards contained only the bare essentials, but they were still entirely too big. Nearly by chance, two Intel employees happened upon this much-too-big circuitry during a tour of RIM's offices. The pair realized that Intel just might be able to help solve this gigantic problem. A year later, a prototype processor was ready.

That year was not wasted at Research In Motion. They spent time studying how people actually type and use a computer. Work was done to increase efficiency and improve battery life. As always, the goal was to create a device that could sit in the palm of the hand and run on a pair of AA batteries.

The Inter@ctive Pager 900 was born. To say that its users hated it would be a bit harsh, but not entirely untrue. By today's standards the device was enormous. Compared to today's Bold 9780, the 900 was three times the size and three times the weight. Even a Torch 9800 weighs less than half that of the 900. Oh yes, people complained. But they kept right on using the Inter@ctive Pager; you couldn't pry it from their hands.

Even as the Inter@ctive Pager 900 - aka the Bullfrog due to its size - launched Lazaridis and RIM were at work on its successor, the Leapfrog. Ready to get the jump on the competition, the new device was planned to be smaller and more useable. A trackwheel was soon added, allowing menus and messages to be traversed with ease. RIM wrote the software code that ran on the device.

And then BellSouth called.

Having realized the Leapfrog models were missing, the two RIM Co-CEO's immediately send someone to find them.  But even without his small production models, Lazaridis carries on.  He sets about to wow the BellSouth executives with the wonder of his invention. He speaks with passion and determination about how the Leapfrog would work. He explains in detail how BellSouth can take its wireless network from being the backbone of a cable truck dispatch system to being the backbone of a nation-wide, two-way email service for corporations. He tells told them of a mass of new customers if the company would but wait for RIM's mobile email.

At last, the models arrive. They are simple wooden ones, the size and shape of the Leapfrog to-be. Pasted on to them are slips of paper designed to mimic what the end user will see as he uses the device. The executives excitedly pass them around, each anxiously awaiting his turn with a wooden model of what will become a revolutionary email appliance.

The meeting was a success. BellSouth not only kept the network, but doubled its size. In August of 1997, BellSouth ordered $70 million (Canadian) worth of Leapfrogs. Research In Motion was on its way to providing wireless email to the masses.

There, out in the horizon of RIM's future, sits a device. It has a trackwheel on the side and a full QWERTY keyboard. In 1998, Balsillie and Lazaridis begin assembling their teams, readying themselves to build this completely new type of device. A device that will come to be called, "BlackBerry."

To be continued... 

Research In Motion vs. BlackBerry - Which name is better?

A few days ago, BlackBerry CEO John Chen sat down with Bloomberg to discuss his briefings with the White House, MDM and most notable for this post, the changing of the company name from Research In Motion to BlackBerry. Chen noted he liked the name Research In Motion better but alas, was not there when the change over happened so he wasn't able to weigh the pros and cons of it all....

Goodbye RIMM, Hello BBRY! - Research In Motion ticker change happens Monday, February 4th

Although it was only announced at the BlackBerry 10 launch event in NYC, the formal name change from Research In Motion to BlackBerry has been happening rather quickly. In fact, the changes have already started in Waterloo as the old signage is being replaced and new BlackBerry logos are going up. No transition like this is fully complete though, until the stock ticker name changes over...

Research In Motion rebranded to BlackBerry

Thorsten Heins has just announced on stage at the BlackBerry 10 launch event that Research In Motion will now be called simply BlackBerry. One brand, one promise. -Thorsten Heins Re-designed, Re-engineered, Re-invented. Awesome! Full press release below. Research In Motion Changes Its Name to BlackBerry Company adopts globally recognized brand, consolidates to single...

Highlights from the opening of RIM's Tech Centers in Brazil

Back in December RIM opened a Tech Center in Brazil. The tech center is part of the BlackBerry Academic Program and while we posted on the launch of one tech center opening, two centers at two universities were actually launched in the country - Federal University of Algaos (UFAL) and Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). You'll remember that RIM also opened a Tech Center in the U....

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Research, no motion: How the BlackBerry CEOs lost an empire

By Jesse Hicks on February 21, 2012 09:34 am 442 Comments

Editor's note : With the now-renamed BlackBerry back in the news for all the wrong reasons, from large layoffs to an investment deal that has a new CEO stepping in , now's a good time to revisit our take on the smartphone pioneer's rise and fall. Published in early 2012, this story covers the company's history right up to the launch of its latest, long-awaited operating system.

Research In Motion, whose BlackBerry phones pioneered wireless email, no longer holds the commanding heights in the smartphone market. With Android, iOS, and even Windows Phone gaining market share, the Waterloo, Ontario, company finds itself in a battle for relevancy. The past year has been especially hard on the once-innovative RIM, but it may be at a turning point. Or the beginning of the end.

Last April, Mike Lazaridis sat in a BBC studio, holding his company's future in his hands: a svelte seven-inch tablet, black, with the word "BlackBerry" emblazoned across its front. The PlayBook.

The company was Research In Motion, the Canadian firm whose BlackBerry virtually created the smartphone market. Success had come almost naturally to the company, until five years ago, when Apple released the first iPhone and upended RIM's long-held strategy of appealing primarily to email-addicted professionals. Apple expanded the market by building a smartphone not just for business people, but for the great mass of well-heeled, tech-hungry consumers. Apple's success opened the door for another large, deep-pocketed competitor: Google, with the acquisition and development of Android. The mobile landscape shifted dramatically — new players, new customers, and new alliances — and RIM made costly missteps scrambling to adjust.

Table of contents

Reckoning in waterloo, present at the creation, rim ascendent, rim triumphant, annus horribilis, a new era for rim, reckoning in waterloo.

Apple's iPad similarly re-defined the market for tablet computers, and then dominated it, a host of Android-powered competitors following in its wake. Apple had already released the iPad 2 by the time RIM offered its response, the tablet Lazaridis held in his hands. It represented a bold transition for the company, replacing its aging OS with one based on QNX, which it had acquired in 2010. With the declaration "amateur hour is over," it promised to bring enterprise-level functionality to what had previously been a consumer market. Apple had made the smartphone a consumer device; RIM decided it would make the tablet an enterprise device. That was the hope, anyway. Surrounded by a lackluster selection of new BlackBerrys and despite being hampered by delays, the PlayBook offered one glimmer of excitement in the company's portfolio.

So there was Mike Lazaridis, four years post-iPhone, sitting with BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones for a quickie interview and product demo . Stout and gray-haired, glasses perched on his nose, and wearing a grey BlackBerry polo shirt, Lazaridis pitched the tablet as delivering "an uncompromised experience in enterprise." He continued in the same vein, gamely batting away questions about the iPad's dominance. Though not a terribly compelling presenter, Lazaridis delivered his bullet points competently, if somewhat disjointedly.

Then the interview turned.

"Can I move on to the problems you've had in terms of security," asked Cellan-Jones, "your various arguments with the Indian government and, uh, a number of governments in the Middle East. Is that anywhere near being sorted out?"

At the word "security," Lazaridis briefly furrowed his brow. He tilted his head and shifted in his chair. He blinked a half-dozen times, tightened and set his jaw, looked from the interviewer to the camera. As the question finished, he looked down and away. An off-screen voice said, "I'm sorry, Rory" as Lazaridis shook his head, saying, "That's just not fair, Rory."

As the off-screen PR voice asked if there was one more question, Lazaridis spoke up, his voice tight and deliberate. "‘Cause first of all, it's not a sec — we have no security problems. We've got the most secure platform — "

"Why's that not a fair question to ask?"

"Because you said — you implied that we have a security problem. We don't have a security problem," Lazaridis said.

"Well, you have an issue..."

Lazaridis again shook his head and looked down. "No, we don't." He blinked slowly and shrugged his shoulders. "We've just been singled out, because we're so successful around the world. It's an iconic product. It's used by business, it's used by leaders, it's used by celebrities, it's used by consumers, it's used by teenagers. I mean, we're just singled out," he said. "You know," he shrugged again, still grasping the Playbook with both hands, "just because of our success."

"Is that sorted out now? That issue is being dealt with?"

"We're dealing with a lot of issues. And I think that we're doing our best to deal with the kind of expectations that we're under," Lazaridis said.

"And you're confident that — we've got a lot of listeners and viewers in the Middle East and in India — you can confidently tell them that they're going to have no problems with being able to use their BlackBerrys, and you being able to give them assurance that everything is, uhm, secure?"

As the question concluded, Lazaridis looked down. At the word "secure" he glanced off-camera, shook his head, and said, "So, it's over. Interview's over." The PR voice said, "We're up on time." He looked back to his interviewer, still shaking his head. He looked down. "Please. You can't use that, Rory. That's just not fair." Again, quieter: "That's just not fair."

Then he looked up, his voice rising, "Sorry, it's not fair. We've dealt with this. Come on, this is a national security issue." He pointed to the camera and said, "Turn that off." Interview over.

Arguably, Lazaridis had a point, at least about the phrasing of the question. The interviewer wanted to ask about the Indian government's threat to shut down BlackBerry operations in the country unless RIM provided surveillance access to BlackBerry Messenger and email. The stand-off had become increasingly heated, and while Lazaridis may not have expected questions about it at what was ostensibly a product demo, the topic shouldn't have been out of bounds.

Timeline: The PlayBook

Early to Mid-2010 : Despite a declaration by Mike Lazaridis that the market and use-case for a tablet is "a difficult one to judge," rumors circulate that the company has something in the works. In June, The Wall Street Journal reports that RIM is working on a tablet, "in the early stages of development," that could ship as early as the end of the year. In the months that follow, more details leak out, including a pair of possible names, "BlackPad" and "SurfBook."

Fall 2010 : The company continues to tease details, including price and specs — under $500 and faster than the iPad. It offers a series of short demos, saying the now-named PlayBook will ship in the first quarter of 2011.

October 25, 2010 : Alongside Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch at the Adobe MAX 2010 conference, Lazaridis shows off the PlayBook’s integration of AIR and its Flash capability. Lazaridis says, "We’re not trying to dumb down the internet for a small, mobile device. What we’re trying to do is bring up the performance and capability of the mobile device to the internet."

December 7, 2010 : Lazaridis appears with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg to demo the PlayBook. Asked when the new OS will appear in phones, he demurs, citing the need for a multi-core chipset. Backstage, according to a source who was present, Lazaridis is confronted by Jonathan Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm, Inc. Rubinstein takes out his Palm Pre and compares its card-based multi-tasking to the PlayBook's. Lazaridis, according to this source, appeared embarrassed. HP’s webOS team went a step further in March 2011, with director of product marketing Jon Oakes seeing "some uncanny similarities" between its TouchPad UI and the BlackBerry Playbook.

February 2011 : RIM announces upcoming connectivity options for the PlayBook, including Wi-Fi, LTE, HSPA, and WiMax varieties. Partnering with Sprint, the company says a WiMax PlayBook will be on sale by summer, with AT&T and Verizon models to come later in the year.

April 2011 : The PlayBook goes on sale in the US and Canada; the company promises an email client within the next 60 days .

June 2011 : RIM says it’s shipped 500,000 PlayBooks. Over the next two quarters, they will claim to ship 200,000 and 150,000, respectively. The company does not release sales numbers.

August 2011 : Sprint cancels plans for a WiMax PlayBook. RIM says it will focus on LTE development, but AT&T and Verizon remain uncommitted; an LTE PlayBook has yet to ship.

October 2011 : RIM demos Android apps running on the PlayBook; announces PlayBook OS 2.0 for February 2012.

November 2011 : The PlayBook gets marked down to $199 for a "limited time," and later down to $99 for employees. Customers upgrading to Enterprise Server 5.0 can receive a free PlayBook. Later, the DingleBerry tool arrives, allowing users to root their devices.

December 2011 : RIM takes a $485 million write-down of its existing PlayBook inventory, admitting it’s worth less than previously assumed. A truck in Indiana is stolen,along with the estimated 5,000 PlayBooks inside.

January 2012 : The Wall Street Journal reports that RIM is hard at work on a PlayBook update, possibly a hardware revamp.

February 2012 : RIM begins giving free PlayBooks to Android developers. On February 21st, the company releases PlayBook OS 2.0, including native email, calendar, and contact applications.

But asking about vaguely defined "security issues" struck at a fundamental attribute of the BlackBerry brand, comparable to asking Apple about "usability issues" or Microsoft about "ubiquity issues." Lazaridis reacted to the word "security" as though someone had questioned his life's work — making a secure, portable email device. He, the perfectionist, the born engineer, had done it, and at the questions he looked hurt, confused, and angry. A more restrained (or less invested) CEO would have redirected the question and filibustered with talking points; instead, Lazaridis walked out.

Regardless of whether he had a legitimate complaint, Lazaridis's failure to regain control of the interview made him look petulant. The video also fed a narrative gaining ground among the technology press, RIM shareholders, and even the company's employees. Research In Motion had lost its will (or worse, its capacity) for innovation, the story went; it was a provincial fiefdom reigned over by two out-of-touch CEOs, Lazaridis and his long-term partner, Jim Balsillie. They'd built something great once, and seen it succeed beyond anyone's wildest expectations. But they'd been caught flatfooted by change. Rather than admit they needed help, they dug in, making themselves oblivious to the new, undeniable realities. They had Founder's Syndrome: they were too close to the work, too enmeshed in an outdated paradigm, where smartphones were souped-up pagers rather than handheld computers. It was not a story that promised a happy ending.

In the months after Lazaridis halted the BBC interview, his company suffered a series of blows.

Reviews declared the PlayBook largely disappointing. Despite a solid hardware design, its software lacked the polish of its competitors — surprising given its long gestation. Even more astounding, it shipped without a calendar, contacts, or native email. A promised update would provide those functions, but for Research In Motion to ship a product without its signature feature — email — seemed unthinkable. In its defense, RIM claimed customers wanted a "free" way to link to their BlackBerrys. Balsillie told Bloomberg that complaints about the missing email client were "overplaying one aspect that really isn't a core element that we've seen from our enterprise customers or webmail people," and that users should "stay tuned" for updates. Still, initial sales proved underwhelming, with only late-year discounts of $300 spurring consumers; admitting a lack of demand, the company took a $485 million write-down on its PlayBook stock. In a final insult, the tablet promising RIM's robust security was rooted, thanks to a tool ignominiously named "Dingleberry." The hack allowed users to modify secure areas of the device — areas RIM had to lock down again, only to have to see them re-hacked. The cat-and-mouse had begun.

Coincident with the product woes, employee morale took a hit in July, when the company announced layoffs of 2,000 employees, 10.5 percent of the total workforce: a "cost optimization program." Hiring had been so fast and furious that the move returned RIM to roughly the size it'd been earlier in the year; the company noted that its rapid growth meant "the workforce had nearly quadrupled in the last five years alone." Not only were the layoffs an ominous sign, but digging deeper, it was obvious RIM had brought on thousands of new employees only to lay off an equal number months later. That didn't cast a positive light on its long-term strategies.

An executive exodus had begun as well. Chief marketing officer Keith Pardy had left in March. COO Don Morrison retired in July after a lengthy medical leave. (This left Thorsten Heins, one of two COOs, to take on more responsibilities and eventually become CEO.) Brian Wallace, who'd been vice president of digital marketing and media, went to Samsung Mobile. Ryan Bidan, senior product manager for the PlayBook, soon joined him there. Mike Kirkup, head of developer relations, left in August; Tyler Lessard, vice president for global alliances and developer relations, was gone by the next month.

Despite the floundering PlayBook, layoffs, and departing executives, the company could still point to rock-solid service. Until October, when BlackBerry servers suffered a four-day, worldwide outage . For the first two days, RIM's public response was virtual silence, as it left crisis management to the carriers. Outraged users took to Twitter, turning #DearBlackBerry into a trending topic. Only on the third day did Lazaridis offer a video apology . The outage, its cause never fully explained to customers, cost over $50 million in revenue. On the same earnings call it announced that number, RIM revealed that phones running its long-awaited BlackBerry 10 OS (the name grudgingly changed after the initially-announced "BBX" trademark turned out to belong to someone else) would not arrive until late 2012. And while the company claimed it was waiting for an upcoming chipset to power its "superphones," the recent delays and setbacks made it easy to speculate that the phones simply weren't ready. In December, Lazaridis and Balsillie cut their salaries to $1 "to further demonstrate our passion, alignment and commitment to RIM's long-term success."

By the end of 2011, RIM stock had lost nearly 75 percent of its value. It hit a seven-year low, even dipping below book value, or the total value of the company's assets. RIM, the market was saying, would be worth more sold for scrap – buildings, patents, unsold PlayBooks – than it was as a functioning company. Many shareholders demanded a change in management. The Canadian mutual-fund company Northwest & Ethical Investments wanted to split the co-CEO roles, and planned to take its proposal directly to investors, an obvious and embarrassing vote of no-confidence. In response, RIM appointed a committee to consider the question; it would issue a recommendation by the end of January 2012. Toronto's Jaguar Financial went even further, grabbing headlines with demands for a new board of directors willing to sell all or part of the company. The stock ticked upward briefly on rumors that suitors as various as Amazon, Microsoft (with partner Nokia), HTC, and Samsung had expressed interest. But none of the rumored interest translated into action; RIM, in fact, rebuffed an offer by Amazon.

Even good news could turn bad. As RIM's North American market share had declined, it still had strong positions worldwide. Jakarta, Indonesia, was the global launch of the BlackBerry Bold 9790 Bellagio . The event promised half-price phones to the first 1,000 customers, attracting an eager crowd. Unfortunately, when the phones sold out, the crowd stampeded, injuring several people. Jakarta police planned to charge several employees with negligence, though they haven't yet done so.

The Jakarta stampede was a PR black eye, but at least it showed someone wanted BlackBerry phones. The year's final bit of bad news proved nothing, but its outlandishness invited all manner of darkly metaphorical readings. Two drunken RIM executives boarded an Air Canada flight in Toronto , bound for Beijing. They became belligerent. Asked to calm down, they became defensive. Finally the flight crew subdued them physically, but safety precautions forced them to turn the plane around. As it descended, the two men succeeded at chewing through their restraints. They were arrested on the ground and charged with mischief, eventually receiving probation and paying $35,382 each in restitution.

How did it come to this? How did Research In Motion — once one of the most respected, innovative tech companies in the world, the company that virtually invented the smartphone — become the embattled underdog? And what, if anything, can turn its fortunes around?

Present at the Creation

Mike Lazaridis still thinks of his company as an upstart, a small Canadian firm taking on the established players. Its unassuming offices are scattered only a few blocks from the University of Waterloo, his alma mater, to which he's donated $123 million to support science and math. He'd come there in 1979, a blue-collar boy from Windsor, Ontario, his mother a seamstress and journalist, his father running a retail store. When he began studying for an electrical engineering degree, he sold the $600 quiz-show buzzers he'd designed in high school to help pay his tuition.

University was a heady time for Laziridis, providing him the resources for engineering projects he dreamed of since he was young. As a four year-old he'd turned a pile of LEGO bricks into a model phonograph; by eight he'd built a pendulum clock that kept actual time. He absorbed knowledge, especially when it came to physics and electronics. Science fiction, which he read voraciously, provided continual inspiration, as did Star Trek , starring fellow Canuck William Shatner. The show's wireless communicators especially stuck with him, and his high school shop teacher, Mr. Micsinszki, had warned him, "Be careful not to get too involved in computers. In the future, electronics, computers, and wireless are all going to combine, and that's going to be the next big thing."

In UW's well-regarded engineering department he found kindred spirits and an environment in which he'd thrive, where academic learning combined with practical co-op training. When he enrolled, much of the department's excitement centered on the burgeoning computer industry. A young company named Microsoft had begun to hire away Waterloo's promising students, but mainframe computing still largely defined the industry. A well-known supercomputing company, Control Data Corporation (CDC), became Lazaridis's first co-op, where he studied automatic data detection and correction.

There he developed a business philosophy that became RIM's defining ethos, foreshadowing both its meteoric rise and later difficulties. A number of Japanese competitors had emerged to challenge CDC, putting the company on the defensive. By trying to chase customers, as Lazaridis saw it, the marketing department had hamstrung its engineers. Rather than doing cutting-edge work, those best and brightest had to simplify their products for the perceived needs of consumers. The frustrated engineers soon began decamping for the sunnier prospects of Silicon Valley, further dulling CDC's competitive edge. It was a mistake Lazaridis told himself he'd never make: his company would nurture engineers, giving them the time and space in which to build the future. "The kiss of death," he later said, "is when you allow marketing to dumb down innovations."

All through university he worked on his own innovations. In high school he'd gotten into wireless communications, using ham radio to broadcast text to televisions. At UW he refined his work, and by 1984, his final year, he'd developed a similar system. He'd engineered his way into a business opportunity. As he imagined it, retailers could use his wireless, programmable displays to replace printed advertising. Though he admitted having almost no business experience, his economics professor convinced him of the idea's viability. With his childhood friend and fellow engineer Doug Fregin, he decided to take the risk. The 23-year-old Lazaridis had his company; after running through a few names, he dubbed it Research In Motion.

RIM Ascendent

The early days were that of a typical startup: a cramped office on the top floor of a strip mall, late nights of building and coding, and days spent scrambling for every contract within reach. They had modest success, enough to keep the lights on, but no real breakout product. An early $600,000 deal with GM augured a bright future. But the LED signs RIM developed fared poorly, shipping fewer than 100 units. The company sold its rights in order to earn some income, then moved on to other projects.

One such project was the DigiSync Film Barcode Reader, which eased the pain film editors and negative cutters felt dealing with time and frame calculations. It came out in 1990, and by 1994 it had garnered an Emmy Award, followed four years later by an Academy Award for technical achievement. Lazaridis accepted the award (alas, not an Oscar statuette) from Anne Heche.

The accolades were nice, but the DigiSync ran parallel to Lazaridis's deeper interests. For him, and thus for RIM, it all came back to wireless data. In the late 1980's he began working with Mobitex, an emerging wireless network technology designed by Ericsson. Cantel, the Canadian wireless company owned by Ted Rogers, had begun building out a Mobitext network, though with only a vague sense of the potential market. It would be North America's first public wireless datacom network, and its idea was groundbreaking — even if the appeal for customers remained cloudy.

Cantel hired Lazaridis and RIM to consult on the project, developing Mobitex-compatible modems and, later, a programming toolkit. Sadly, when Cantel's network launched in 1990, it bombed. Impressive as it was, few even within the industry could fathom how they'd use it. The email era hadn't yet dawned (let alone wireless email), nor had the idea of two-way paging. Cantel scaled back its investment, moving employees to other projects.

That same year, RAM Mobile Data (with later became Bell South Mobile) began building its own Mobitex system. It hired RIM. The company thus got more experience with the network, and Lazaridis began thinking about better uses for it. Balsillie later called it "RIM's sandbox." For the next decade it developed modems, point-of-sale systems, and other components for the network.

In late 1990, RAM Mobile Data wanted a two-way pager. The pager had been around for over 30 years, in one form or another, but had always been a one-way device. With Mobitex deployed, there was now a way to change that. RIM began work on the pager, but already Lazaridis was looking ahead to the next idea: a wireless PDA.

Two important elements helped make RIM successful in the 1990s. The first was Lazaridis's relentless pursuit of innovation in wireless data communications. Where other, larger companies had tried and failed (or, more often, been blind to opportunities), he saw possibilities. He and his engineers then worked like mad to realize them.

The second was the hiring of Jim Balsillie in 1992. Balsillie, the self-declared "quant jock" with a Harvard MBA, gave RIM a new business-savvy. Before he arrived, the company had excelled at engineering, but its lack of experience navigating the high-stakes world of contracts and partnerships made it seem rudderless. Balsillie brought discipline, and he knew his role: keeping the coffers full so Lazaridis had the freedom to innovate. Or, as he put it later, "My job is to raise money, Mike's is to spend it." Some of that money was Balsillie's own; he'd gone all-in, taking a 60 percent pay cut, mortgaging his house, and putting $250,000 of his life savings into company stock.

By the time Balsillie came onboard, RIM was fully dedicated to wireless. It pushed forward with the two-way pager design even as Lazaridis had moved past it, to envisioning a wireless PDA. In July 1992, Apple's John Sculley, the CEO who ousted Steve Jobs, gave a CES keynote on the theme of digital convergence. He coined the term "personal digital assistants" to describe the small, handheld computers he believed would become commonplace. He offered the now-famous Knowledge Navigator video as Apple's vision for the future. By 2011, this "very sophisticated PDA" would be connected to all the world's knowledge; it would respond to voice commands much like Siri. That was the dream, but Sculley had more concrete ideas in mind, too. Though he never mentioned it by name, he'd previewed the Newton platform that debuted soon after.

Timeline: RIM

1984 : RIM founded.

1985 : First contract: $600,000 from General Motors for networked displays.

1987 : Lazaridis sees wireless data technology, decides on company’s future.

1988 : Ted Rogers licenses Mobitex, first nation-wide public wireless data technology in North America.

1989 : Lazaridis begins consulting on Mobitex technology.

1990 : RIM introduces its DigiSync Film KeyKode Reader.

1992 : Balsillie joins the company; sales revenue exceeds $1 million.

1994 : RIM introduces the first wireless point of sale terminal, using Mobitex.

1996 : The Inter@ctive Pager, the first two-way messaging pager, debuts.

1998 : The RIM 950 Wireless Handheld debuts, later known as the BlackBerry.

1999 : BlackBerry 850 Wireless Handheld PDA launches.

2001 : NTP patent lawsuit begins.

2002 : Judge rules in favor of NTP, declares RIM responsible for damages of $23.1 million.

2003 : Court injunction bans BlackBerry sales in US; ruling stayed pending RIM’s legal appeal.

2004 : BlackBerry has over 2 million subscribers. Appeals court upholds infringement ruling.

2005 : BlackBerry subscribers pass 4 million. Patent lawsuit denied hearing by US Supreme Court.

2006 : RIM and NTP settle patent lawsuit for $612.5 million. BlackBerry has over 5 million subscribers.

2007 : Securities regulators investigate stock option grants. Apple debuts iPhone. BlackBerry subscribers pass 12 million.

2008 : Bold, Pearl Flip, and Storm phones launch. RIM and Motorola embroiled in patent dispute.

2009 : BlackBerry App World launches. Subscriber base reaches 36 million.

2010 : PlayBook unveiled. Subscriber base reaches 55 million.

2011 : PlayBook debuts to mixed reviews. Subscribers reach 75 million. Worldwide service outage in October.

2012 : Lazaridis and Balsillie step down as CEOs, appointing Thorsten Heins sole Chief Executive Officer.

Lazaridis was unimpressed. The whole point of a PDA, he believed, was constant connectivity. The Newton required syncing with another computer, making it more a peripheral than a stand-alone device. To its credit, Apple saw the Newton as just a starting point; Sculley and his engineers conceived of it as a platform that would, in time, integrate wireless connectivity.

But like most of the other big hitters working on PDA tech — a list that included Motorola, Bell South, AT&T, and Palm — Apple didn't believe the wireless version was feasible. At least not yet. "From a conceptual point of view, John [Sculley] was absolutely right," former Newton Systems Group chief Gaston Bastiens told PenComputing in 1998. "The infrastructure for two-way wireless at the time was not there; we all knew it was a couple of years away, but it was always part of our platform strategy." The company spent five years and $100 million on the Newton, before Steve Jobs returned and killed it.

Where skeptics of the day, including Intel chairman Andy Grove, saw technical impossibilities, Lazaridis saw an engineering challenge. If current electronics devoured too much power for the batteries of the day, well, he'd optimize them. He believed he could make wireless work, and take it farther than anyone else.

So his company went forward with the Mobitex products. In fall 1996, it unveiled the RIM 900 Inter@ctive Pager, a pocket-sized clamshell device with a diminutive keyboard. It cost $675, but along with the two-way paging, it provided peer-to-peer messaging (complete with delivery and read receipts), the ability to send faxes and text-to-speech messages, and an Internet gateway for email. It was glitchy and a little too heavy, not exactly a stunning success for the company, but it showed what could be done. RIM went forward with its successor, the 950.

Lazaridis had recently hit on the idea of a thumb-typing keyboard, and the patented concept got worked into the 950. That meant faster typing, but another advance proved even more important: always-on email. With wireless connectivity and a superior keyboard, it was the first device that could replace a PC or laptop. And it could go three weeks on a single AA battery, quieting the power-problem skeptics. The rave reviews earned RIM lucrative contracts with, among others, Bell South, IBM, and Panasonic.

But the legions of new fans were using it in the old way: like a pager. Given the name, this was understandable, but Lazaridis and his engineers knew it was more than that. The ampersat in Inter@ctive Pager only hinted at what they considered the device's killer feature, email. In a rare moment of going to the market, rather than waiting for it to come to him, Lazaridis realized the problem. They had the technology. And they were used to talking to people who understood its intricacies, who worked with it every day: engineers and IT heads. But to really take off, their work had to go beyond that community. It needed to be understandable to consumers. In short, it needed marketing.

RIM brought in Lexicon Branding, the marketing shop behind the Apple PowerBook and Intel Pentium brands. Lexicon set out to establish a unique brand, one that would replace the blandly descriptive 950 Inter@ctive Pager with something more dynamic. Pagers were a dime a dozen; this was something different. What was different about it? The keyboard. The keyboard made it more than a pager: it made it a true, professional messaging device. How to draw attention to the keyboard and everything it symbolized?

It kind of looks like a strawberry. The buttons are like little seeds.

No, not strawberry. Straw is a slow syllable, explained Lexicon's resident linguist. This is fast, zippy. "Berry" is good, but we need a different prefix.

BlackBerry.

RIM Triumphant

Even the skeptical Lazaridis loved the name. In January 1999, RIM launched its BlackBerry wireless email service across North America, operating on the Mobitex networks run by its partners, Rogers Cantel and BellSouth. It offered a handheld device with a suite of PDA functions (calendar, address book, task list), and encrypted email that synchronized with your existing address. It integrated with company networks, making it easy for IT departments to implement.

And it was a hit from the very beginning. Balsillie knew he could hook anyone who tried the service, so he flooded Wall Street and Capitol Hill with BlackBerry devices. That got the professionals, the lawyers and politicians and journalists. He went after early adopters, too, providing tech conferences with free units. Seen in the hands of the powerful and influential, it became not just an email reader, but a status symbol. It signaled the user's importance, as did the viral-friendly tagline: Sent via BlackBerry. Soon everyone from Oprah to Madonna would be confessing their devotion to the BlackBerry.

BlackBerry became a massive revenue stream. RIM earned huge margins on the hardware (35 percent-plus) and the service it provided the telcos (65 percent-plus); RIM's sales increased 80 percent, to $85 million, in the BlackBerry's first year. The next year, sales went up another 160 percent, hitting $221 million. Users numbered 164,000 in North America alone, and all of them were paying. The original BlackBerry relay server, located under a software developer's desk, soon became a warehouse-sized server farm.

In 1999, the company went public, raising $255 million. A second offering in November 2000 netted another $900 million. RIM was an analyst darling as Balsillie set about conquering as many markets as possible. Rapid growth wasn't a fluke; it was a plan.

There were few setbacks along the way. The carrier partners who sold its BlackBerrys to consumers often had trouble selling the high-end devices fast enough. Used to selling direct, RIM suddenly had less influence over its revenue stream. That in part led to "The 10% Purge" of 2002, when the company cut staff and expenses in an effort to refocus.

And there was the patent lawsuit. In 2000, a Virginia patent holding company named NTP contacted RIM offering to license certain patents, including those related to a wireless email system. NTP believed it owned the intellectual property underlying the BlackBerry products, and when Lazaridis's company didn't respond, it filed suit.

RIM was no stranger to patent suits, as both a plaintiff and a defendant. It considered NTP's filing a nuisance, another example of patent trolling by a non-practicing company. (Ironically, NTP's legal action had begun partly because of RIM's own lawsuit against Glenayre Electronics over a patent on integrated electronic mailboxes.) It responded with a press release declaring the complaint "unsubstantiated," and that "the only documentation accompanying the letter was a collection of seemingly random marketing materials printed from RIM's web site."

When the case went to trial — surprising for patent litigation — RIM argued that NTP's patents should be declared invalid due to prior art. The lawyers demonstrated a working wireless email technology from 1988. However, after studying the software, NTP's lawyers claimed it was actually from 1993. Feeling he'd been duped, the judge reprimanded RIM's attorneys. He then ruled against the company: the final verdict was "willful" infringement, with $23 million in damages. Research In Motion vowed to appeal.

The appeals process dragged on for five years, becoming a sinkhole of money and attention for RIM. The price to settle kept growing. Worse was the possibility of an injunction that would shut down BlackBerry service in the US. Finally, in 2006, the two companies reached an agreement that netted NTP $612.5 million.

Throughout the legal wrangling, BlackBerry had only grown larger in the public mind. It was synonymous with constant connectivity, and with the "CrackBerry" addiction. It was still the sign of the well-connected and ambitious. And when phone systems failed in New York and DC on 9/11, it was the BlackBerry network that provided backup communication. That earned the company powerful friends: during the NTP suit, the US Department of Justice voiced its opposition to a network shutdown.

Meanwhile, the devices had changed slowly, incrementally, just as Lazaridis wanted. (Balsillie called it "managed evolutions.") He and his team had already cracked the hardest engineering problems; successive phones offered refinements and improvements. This iterative process let the company respond to carrier demands for distinguishing features, even minor ones. And a slow development process gave customers a feeling of familiarity: they weren't being bombarded with new and confusing features. The strategy was simple: keep the current users happy, and let the BlackBerry name do the rest. It had cachet a marketer couldn't even hope to buy.

That approach earned RIM nine million subscribers by mid-2007, adding another million every three months, and partnering with 300 carriers in 120 countries. It was worth $42 billion , coming off a quarter in which its sales had increased 76 percent, topping $1 billion. And the market for corporate email would only grow.

The previous fall, RIM had begun to target consumers. But Lazaridis believed consumers would come to RIM; there was no need for a radical redesign. That philosophy led to the Pearl, the first BlackBerry with a camera and media player. Though many smartphones — from Motorola, Palm, and Samsung — had better cameras and media playback, RIM wanted to increase its appeal without alienating its base. The Pearl was a "prosumer" smartphone: BlackBerry's professional communications capabilities alongside basic multimedia. It launched well, and RIM delivered a steady stream of new versions.

As RIM made its first tentative appeals to consumers, a new competitor waited on the horizon, one that would redefine the smartphone industry.

The iPhone.

On January 9, 2007, with his customary dramatic flair, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone by saying, "every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything." He sprinkled his demo with words like "magic" and "cool," but also lamented the current crop of smartphones, for everything from needless complexity to mobile web browsing: "Boy, it's bad out there."

He lined up four current smartphones, Motorola's Moto Q, a Palm Treo, the Nokia E62, and BlackBerry's Pearl. The problem with them, he said, is in the bottom 40; the screen cut to show their keyboards. "They all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not. They all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application," he said, "What we're gonna do is get rid of all these buttons, and just make a giant screen." Apple had turned the keyboard into a piece of software.

Jobs declared the iPhone software five years ahead of its time. Indeed, one apocryphal story describes an all-hands meeting, days after the Jobs keynote, where RIM executives deemed the "Jesus phone" technically impossible. True or not, it fits with Lazaridis's contrasting focus on hardware. He didn't dispute the elegance of iOS; Lazaridis had long respected Apple's design acumen. But, he said,"Not everyone can type on a piece of glass. Every laptop and virtually every other phone has a tactile keyboard. I think our design gives us an advantage." Superior hardware would win out, he believed.

Publicly, RIM displayed a cavalier attitude toward the iPhone, dismissing it as another in a long line of supposed BlackBerry killers. Balsillie said, "It's kind of one more entrant into an already very busy space with lots of choice for consumers … But in terms of a sort of a sea-change for BlackBerry, I would think that's overstating it." Meanwhile, it began engineering a response.

Apple, having dropped the "Computer" from its name the same day it released the iPhone, plotted a different trajectory. If RIM wanted to focus on business users, but let consumers ride along, Apple would woo those same consumers with easy-to-use, visually appealing hardware and software — and later, almost inevitably, it would move its way into the business world. A strong web browser and growing app ecosystem left Apple better prepared for always-connected consumers who wanted more than just email.

The differences went deeper than just strategy. Apple was at its core a consumer electronics company headed by a non-engineer; RIM a wireless technology company founded by an electrical engineer. Lazaridis believed in quantification, in the rational world of numbers and formulae. "One of the things that we've really internalized here at RIM," he often explained, "is the belief in the numbers, belief in mathematics, belief in the limits imposed by physics, and the general understanding of physics. If you don't understand the limitations you can't design something that works well within those limitations."

So in thinking about smartphone design, Lazaridis and his company thought about limits. There was the size limit: the phone had to be small enough to be portable, but large enough to be usable. There was the battery life limit: a dead device is a useless device. And finally, there was the bandwidth limit: Lazaridis believed in conserving bandwidth to enable networks to scale. Too many bandwidth-hogging devices would bog down the network — as AT&T came to realize as the iPhone grew in popularity .

RIM designed its phones within limits, and its conservative designs had their appeal. Size and battery life appealed to road warrior professionals using the devices; low bandwidth usage appealed to the people who managed the devices, and to the telecom carriers. Apple ignored RIM's self-imposed limitations, producing an iPhone with less than stellar battery life that (eventually) gobbled up bandwidth. Network utilization was the carriers' problem, not Apple's, and it bet customers would tolerate a short battery life because the phone could do so much.

In retrospect, Apple's strategy seems obvious, and obviously winning. But Steve Ballmer epitomized the prevailing wisdom among many competitors when he exclaimed,

$500? Fully subsidized? With a plan? That is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine. It may sell very well or not… Right now we're selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year. Apple is selling zero phones a year. In six months they'll have the most expensive phone by far, ever, in the marketplace. Let's see how the competition goes .

And indeed it went.

Even today, though, the consumer-centric model hasn't worked everywhere, as it imagines a particular kind of consumer. The iPhone and Google's Android (which used a similar approach) may dominate in North America, where RIM's market share has dropped precipitously. But even while RIM has started to lose some business and government customers — see Halliburton switching to iPhones, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration moving to iOS, and the US Army field-testing Android — the company has 75 million worldwide subscribers. It touts high growth in France, South Africa, Mexico and Argentina, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, with 61% of its revenue coming from outside the US, UK, and Canada . Over half its hardware growth comes from outside the US. Balsillie's early efforts to spread the BlackBerry far and wide have earned RIM a strong position among heavy texters worldwide, with BBM as a selling point. In countries where carriers don't subsidize phones, price becomes an important factor, as can network usage, depending on how customers are charged. In a way, today's RIM has begun to look like yesterday's Nokia: a worldwide brand with little traction in the US.

But what happened post-iPhone? It's fair to say the iPhone blindsided RIM — as it did Nokia, Palm, and Microsoft, to name just a few. Those companies reacted by retooling their operating systems; Android, still in embryonic form, received a similar revamp. Such radical strategic shifts were necessary to remain competitive, but none of those companies had a strong business investment in their older operating systems. They either had little market share (Palm, Microsoft) or had a potential successor OS in the works (Nokia, moving from Symbian to Maemo).

RIM didn't have those options. It couldn't easily update its aging operating system, but switching to a new OS could mean losing customers — and it would likely take years. And why undertake such a project unless absolutely necessary? There wasn't an immediately obvious business case for changing direction. The iPhone hadn't become a BlackBerry killer. As the first iteration gave way to the iPhone 3G, BlackBerry sales hadn't suffered. In fact, they'd increased. New smartphone users lured by Apple's hype could find reasons to choose either: the more-expensive iPhone had better multimedia features and an elegant interface, but the BlackBerry was cheaper, with a physical keyboard and excellent messaging features. Apple had helped expand the market, accelerating smartphone adoption. Balsillie had predicted as much with customary glibness on the eve of the iPhone's launch. "I've said before they did us a great favour because they drove attention to the converged appliance space," he told analysts . "The attention to it has quite frankly been overwhelmingly positive for our business."

Critics of the company consider that a rose-colored view, and one that RIM took far too long to shake. Balsillie even joked in 2008 , "We're a very poorly diversified portfolio. It either goes to the moon or it crashes to earth. But it's making it to the moon pretty well, so we'll stick with it." That metaphor assumes gravity is the only challenge, and that no one else is aiming for the moon. Between 2006-2009, as the iPhone gained market share, Balsillie made three separate bids for professional hockey teams: first the Pittsburgh Penguins, then the Nashville Predators, and finally the Phoenix Coyotes. All the bids failed; in the case of the Coyotes, the bid went to court. In Balsillie's hockey dealings — coming at a crucial time for the company — critics see a lack of urgency. The iPhone had changed things, and RIM was too slow to respond.

The company's first true response to the iPhone was the BlackBerry Bold 9000. It launched in the US in November 2008; software issues and revisions for compatibility with AT&T's 3G network delayed the launch, originally announced for summer. The Bold garnered positive reviews for its brilliant screen and new, smoother fonts; web browsing, however, still disappointed. The BlackBerry Storm was the first keyboardless, touchscreen BlackBerry, and received decidedly mixed reviews. While delivering the expected email excellence, it lacked Wi-Fi and suffered from glitchy, slow software.

Research In Motion remained competitive: it had a respectable market share and in 2009 was named the fastest growing company in the world by Fortune magazine. But it was yoked to an aging OS that had to be compatible with a wide variety of handsets. Apple made one phone, with one OS. Android, too, had a touchscreen-native interface that visually outclassed the BlackBerry's, and it could be adapted to many phones.

In 2010, RIM began to transition away from the BlackBerry OS. Having already bought several other software firms, that year it acquired Canadian firm QNX Software Systems for its OS and Swedish designers The Astonishing Tribe to work on the user interface. The acquisitions would enable RIM's next-generation operation system, which would power tablets and the long-promised "superphones" on which the company continued to work.

It needed to happen. RIM had begun to lose market share — worse, in the long term, it had begun to lose brand cachet. BlackBerry was increasingly seen as an also-ran, not a leader in its class, and it couldn't remain competitive without compelling software. But was new software enough? And was it already too late?

Annus horribilis

By many accounts, the problems at RIM go deeper than just outdated software. Things reached a crisis point in 2011, which could be known as "The Year of the Open Letter." In July, just before the company announced its layoffs, BGR published a letter attributed to a "high-level RIM executive." It described the "transition" as "chaotic," with the workforce feeling "demotivated" by a lack of leadership. The author portrayed him or herself as a frustrated company loyalist needing to tell some hard truths.

"We missed not boldly reacting to the threat of iPhone when we saw it in January over four years ago," the letter read. "We laughed and said they are trying to put a computer on a phone, that it won't work. We should have made the QNX-like transition then. We are now 3-4 years too late. That is the painful truth… it was a major strategic oversight and we know who is responsible."

Delaying the transition had made RIM's position even more difficult. Not only would it be developing an entirely new operating system, eventually dubbed BlackBerry 10, but in the meantime it would maintain the previous version, BlackBerry 7. Any BlackBerry fan considering an upgrade would have to choose between buying an already obsolete device or waiting for the much-delayed BB10. It's a situation so common that business schools have a name for it: the Osborne Effect. When you announce great new products before they're ready, you may excite your customers. But you also give them reason to hold off buying, which can have a serious effect on sales. RIM hoped to use BB7 as a stop-gap, but the company says 80 to 90 percent of its US users don't run it — there's little reason to buy a new phone for a dead-end OS, and loyal fans may be waiting for BB10.

If customers were unenthusiastic about buying a dead-end OS, it's not surprising that employees didn't want to work on one. Yet according to Maclean's, the company split off its BB10 development group, hoping to give it the feel of a cohesive, passionate startup within the larger company. Similar compartmentalizing had worked at other companies, including Apple, but in this case it proved a predictable disaster. Those not working on BB10 recognized their work on legacy code would soon be obsolete. It created competition between haves and have-nots precisely when the company needed a unified effort, leading to employee protests and declining morale.

Alastair Sweeny knows how bad morale has gotten at RIM. He's the author of BlackBerry Planet: The Story of Research In Motion and the Little Device that Took the World by Storm , from which much of this history draws. Dysfunction is not new: that four-fold increase in its workforce that the company likes to brag about has meant an increase in bureaucracy, politicking, and what Sweeny calls a population of "time servers." He says, "It's like the Soviet Union. Everyone's pretending to work." Sweeny compares it to another brand-named tech firm with a reputation, deserved or not, for hidebound bureaucracy: Microsoft. RIM, he says, has lost the fire of a startup (despite heavy-handed efforts to recapture it), but without developing into a mature company. One anonymous employee agreed, telling BGR , "We are no longer a company that is innovative and energetic, we are drowning in paperwork."

A company at the top of its game can suffer some "time servers," but in times of adversity it's often the more confident, agile workers who go elsewhere. RIM's both seen an exodus of talent and had difficulty bringing in new recruits. If you're a bright, promising engineer, why stay in Waterloo, Ontario, when you can move to Silicon Valley and work for Facebook or Twitter? Last year's layoffs appeared designed only to reduce headcount, not to cull the well-insulated "time servers." Instead, many talented employees chose to leave — or were shown the door.

Jamie Murai was a student the University of Waterloo who had considered working with RIM. Not as an employee, but as a developer. Having written apps for iOS, he thought he'd try doing so on the PlayBook. He found the process so cumbersome that he posted a blog entry, " You Win, RIM! (An Open Letter To RIM's Developer Relations) ." It went viral, getting 33,000 hits on the first day, he says. Soon after, Tyler Lessard, then the VP for developer relations, met him for coffee.

Much of what he'd written about, Murai says, Lessard already knew. The shortcomings in RIM's developer platform had long frustrated his team. "When they got all this bad press from my letter," Murai says, "all of a sudden their bosses were saying, 'Ok, you have the resources now get it fixed.' So it seems it was kind of a catalyst to get some things changed."

Rather than work on PlayBook software, Murai founded his own company, Maide, and moved to iOS apps. Tyler Lessard left RIM, but the company's new VP of developer relations, Alec Saunders, sees a bright future for developers. He told The Verge that, "For the first time, the company has an evangelism team." If Saunders is any indication, RIM now understands itself as a platform company competing with Apple. It's targeted Android developers especially, offering a tool to convert their apps, as well as free PlayBooks. Saunders often cites RIM data showing that the BB App World serves over six million downloads a day, generating 40 percent more revenue for developers than the Android Market. Where once the company's focus fell mainly on hardware, building an app ecosystem means strong attention to software. It also means recruitment: turning developers themselves into evangelists.

Persuasion offers its own challenges: two app ecosystems already compete for developer attention and resources. Given RIM's market and mindshare, Saunders understands the task before him. "Yeah, we're going through a transition, and every business, especially a platform business, goes through this," Saunders says, "My challenge, when you pick up a BB10 handset, is to make sure you don't say, 'Where are the apps?'"

Irish developer Steven Troughton-Smith attended a demonstration of the PlayBook 2.0 OS at this year's BlackBerry DevCon Europe. He left impressed at the interface, and eager to see BB10 shipping on phones. "If they can get everything to the level of the demos they showed today," he says, "then it could be a very interesting operating system. And with luck people will flock to it as upgrading Blackberrys; they can see these devices are just as graphical and awesome as an iPhone or Android phone or Windows Phone." He's already ported apps from Android to the PlayBook, and found the developer framework compelling. "If they can continue to make quality stuff and if BlackBerry 10 actually ships," he says, "I don't see any reason why I wouldn't release apps for it. I mean if it's good enough."

Timeline: BlackBerry 10

April 2010 : RIM announces it will acquire QNX Software Systems from Harmon International. Company press releases focus on in-car displays and embedded devices; no mention is made of a new BlackBerry OS.

August 2010 : Bloomberg reports the upcoming BlackBerry tablet will sport a QNX-built OS, offering a fresh code base and separating it from BlackBerry 6.

December 2010 : RIM buys Swedish UI designers The Astonishing Tribe.

May 2011 : At its annual BlackBerry World conference, RIM announces BlackBerry 7. It is not compatible with older devices, nor does it incorporate the new work of the PlayBook OS.

August 2011 : Bloomberg reports that the next-gen phones will support Android apps when they debut in "early" 2012. Rumors circulate about a BlackBerry device codenamed "Colt," intended to debut in the first quarter of 2012.

October 2011 : RIM announces BBX, its next generation, QNX-based OS. "It'll be for phones, it'll be for tablets, and it'll be for embedded devices," says QNX founder Dan Dodge. The "whole company is aligning behind a single platform and a single vision."

November 2011 : The company says its new phones will have the same resolution and aspect ratio as the PlayBook, making for easier development across devices. Todd Wood, RIM’s senior vice president of Industrial Design, tells Pocket-Lint the new phones will be "charming, whimsical and fun." Photos surface of a purported BBX device, the BlackBerry "London."

December 2011 : Reacting to a trademark battle started in October, RIM changes the name of its upcoming operating system from BBX to BlackBerry 10. It also announces that, needing a "highly integrated dual-core LTE platform" that’s not yet available, BlackBerry 10 devices won’t launch until "the latter part of calendar 2012."

January 2012 : News breaks that RIM has canceled the BlackBerry Colt and BlackBerry Milan, leaving it with one BlackBerry 10 handset for 2012. Company reps say the London will appear at Mobile World Congress in February, but will not launch until the third quarter.

A new era for RIM

Less than a year after he walked out of the BBC interview, Mike Lazaridis, along with Jim Balsillie, stepped down as CEO of Research In Motion , the company he'd founded 27 years earlier. The news went out on a Sunday, January 22nd, as many Americans sat engrossed with playoff football. "Jim and I approached the board and we told them that the time is now," Lazaridis said, explaining that with RIM’s strategy set — PlayBook 2.0 software shipping in February; BlackBerry 10 phones coming later in the year — the transition to a new CEO would be less disruptive.

Both men remain on the board of directors, Lazaridis as vice chairman. He's not walked away from the company, but told The Record he looks forward to spending more time with his family. The "security issue" that had provoked him was finally settled in February, with RIM agreeing to provide India's Department of Telecom access to BBM messages and email passing through BlackBerry servers.

Thorsten Heins now takes up the helm at RIM. He's 54 (four years older than Lazaridis), a native German who spent most of his working life with Siemens, Europe's largest electronics and electrical engineering company. In his four years at RIM, he's moved up from being Senior Vice President of the BlackBerry Handheld division, to COO of Product and Sales, and finally to CEO . He has a conservative view of the company's future, promising a more mature, focused approach. He's emphasized the need for strong marketing and attainable deadlines. His strategy, in a word, could be called "incremental."

Developer Jamie Murai, for one, thinks only an outsider can truly revive the company. "They need to bring on someone new," he says, "But who knows who that is? It's not like there's a list sitting around, 'These are the people you hire to turn around a multi-billion dollar company.'"

One outspoken board member disagrees about the need for new blood. Five years ago, Jim Balsillie tapped a fellow Harvard MBA, Roger Martin, to join RIM's board of directors. The company had just weathered a scandal about back-dated stock options, which had enriched employees at the expense of shareholders. Executives settled with Canadian regulators for $75 million, but the lingering public impression was that the CEOs had treated RIM like their personal piggy bank. Appointing Martin, the well-respected dean of business at University of Toronto, would help redeem RIM's image; strengthening the board would assuage shareholders worried about the co-CEOs' leadership.

Yet according to Martin, Lazaridis and Balsillie tightly controlled the company's destiny, with few above or below them wielding influence. According to him, not even the board of directors, tasked with protecting shareholders interests, could have forced a change. "If we were to say to Jim and Mike, ‘Well, we're the board and you should go away now,' they would have laughed at us," Martin told The Globe and Mail .

The pair had built a $10 billion company that, in Martin's view, did not have a deep talent pool from which to draw; nor could it recruit a qualified leader from outside its ranks. "I laugh at the vast majority of critics when they say ‘Oh, you should have made this CEO transition, like, four years ago.' Yeah, right — like, to who?" he said. "So we're supposed to hand it over to children, or morons from the outside who will destroy the company? Or should we try to build our way to having succession?" (RIM stock dropped 2.7% following his comments .)

The succession plan, as he tells it, coalesced around Heins only in late 2011. Still, he says, the former co-CEOs felt no pressure to resign; they have full faith in Heins and his leadership ability. In an email to employees, Lazaridis and Balsillie describe Heins as a telecommunications veteran, a physicist, a product developer, and a people manager. They point to his experience in sales and marketing. But most importantly, he is "a passionate believer in what we do at RIM, and brings the rigor and creativity necessary to help all of you do it better and faster ." (Research In Motion did not respond to repeated requests for comment about this article.)

So Heins represents continuity, not radical change. The Monday after his appointment he spoke to shareholders and described RIM as an "amazing company with a passionate and loyal global customer base" — a company undergoing a transformation, but with a strong base on which to build. "We're not just a service company," he said, "we run a network, we run services and we run devices and we can create formidable integrated solutions. This is a very unique position in the wireless landscape." Later that week he suggested the possibility of licensing the BlackBerry OS to hardware partners, but dismissed any ideas of breaking up the company. On taking the reins he said, "There’s no need for me to shake this company up or turn it upside down. We are not at a point where we try to define a strategy. That’s done."

Despite the turmoil, not everyone thinks radical change is necessary. "I don't think they need a turn-around," says BlackBerry Planet author Alastair Sweeny. "They just need to stop over-promising and under-delivering. This has been a humbling experience for them. They have to stop thinking they're the center of the universe and get back to serving their customers."

Michael Mace compares Thorsten Heins to two CEOs who did manage to turn around multi-billion dollar companies. "When you add up all those challenges, it's hard to say that RIM just needs to execute better," he says. "This feels more like a fundamental rethink, along the lines of what Jobs did when he returned to Apple or Lou Gerstner's remarkable transformation of IBM. Is Heins a Gerstner? And does he have enough support from the Board to make that sort of change? I guess we're going to find out."

A final analysis comes from the man whose company pulled the rug out from under RIM in 2007. Speaking in late 2010, he said, "They must move beyond their comfort area into the unfamiliar territory in trying to become a software platform company. I think it's going to be a challenge for them to create a competitive platform and to convince developers to create apps for yet a third platform after iOS and Android. With 300,000 apps on Apple's app store RIM has a high mountain ahead of them to climb."

That man, of course, was Steve Jobs.

Photo credit: Getty Images

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This is not a cell phone ad. New BlackBerry miniseries fleshes out the story of RIM

Co-writer matthew miller wants to change how canadians see their own stories.

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BlackBerry co-writer Matthew Miller knows that having a film and a miniseries with the same name, coming out within six months of each other, could be confusing for audiences. Particularly when they star the same people, have the same creative team behind them, and contain many of the same scenes. But for this screenwriting veteran — he and co-writer Matt Johnson worked together on cult favourite Nirvanna the Band the Show — it's a risk worth taking. (Johnson also directed BlackBerry , and plays Research in Motion co-founder Doug Fregin.) 

• Shoresy stars on how the Letterkenny spinoff is 'true to the spirit' of Sudbury

For one thing, creating a miniseries and a film at the same time opens up more potential funding avenues. It also helps broaden the audience — something that's especially important for a Canadian production. 

"I don't know if you know this or not, but it's pretty hard to get Canadians to see Canadian content in film or television," Miller says. "I think there's hesitation from Canadian audiences to engage with the culture that's been created by and for them."

"We feel like for a small, independent Canadian film and series to have a second go around, to build an audience and get people talking about it, is pretty helpful."

While it can be hard to get Canadians to watch their own cultural products, Miller says American and overseas audiences don't have any problem with BlackBerry 's Canadianness. The film received critical acclaim in the U.S., and the series has been picked up by AMC south of the border. 

"I think Canadians tell themselves Americans don't want to see Canadian stories, because it's easier to stomach that than the idea that Canadians don't want to see Canadian stories," he says. "I think people are more and more curious about what's coming out of Canada and our Canadian stories. One of the really amazing things to come out of BlackBerry and the experience of taking it around festivals and screening it is that nobody knew it was a Canadian story outside of Canada, which speaks to our own inability to celebrate our successes and champion ourselves."

• The Bannocking is the latest in a wave of Indigenous horror stories onscreen

But audiences all over the world did know BlackBerry , and the film came out at the same time as several other "brand story films" earlier this year, which made BlackBerry part of a broader cultural trend. Those movies included Air — the Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Viola Davis vehicle about the creation of the Air Jordan — and Tetris , which starred Taron Egerton and told the story of the video game of the same name. Miller says there is a bit of a difference between BlackBerry and those films, though.

"[What separates] BlackBerry from those other movies… is the stature of the brand in the marketplace today," he says. "I don't think anybody could accuse BlackBerry of being a two-hour commercial for a cell phone company… At the end of [Air], you're still like, 'Well, I have to put something on my feet — maybe I wanna put on Nike sneakers?' And that part of those movies makes me a little uncomfortable. Fortunately, we never had that problem." 

He acknowledges that not every film can be turned into a miniseries, or vice versa, but says that it worked well for this particular story. The miniseries allowed them to flesh out certain parts of the story, and the tale of Research in Motion — BlackBerry's parent company — can be broken out fairly neatly into three chapters: the late '90s, when it was a scrappy start-up founded by two geeks from Southwestern Ontario; the early '00s, when it was a fast-growing stock market darling making a status phone; and the late '00s/early '10s, when it was a lumbering corporate behemoth, unable to respond to new competition.  

"We don't see it like 'one is better than the other,' or 'this is the director's cut,'" he says. "One is very much a feature film, one is very much a three-part limited series, and we wanted to be truthful to both of those formats."

"It wouldn't be my first choice to replicate again in the future because it's just challenging… but I do think it worked well for this project."

Having said that, he thinks the film and television industry will keep having to find more creative ways to make projects happen, particularly smaller projects like BlackBerry .

"The movies that made me want to make movies as a kid were those with people in rooms talking," he says. "I think the industry thinking is like, 'Oh, all of those stories are now relegated to streamers and HBO… people don't go see movies like that anymore.' I think that's nonsense. If you make intelligent movies for intelligent audiences, they will come to see it. What's changed is the business model… So that means we have to shift things. Can we make movies for a little bit less money? How are we going to do that?"

Miller has an "if you build it, they will come" attitude to getting Canadians — and the rest of the world — to watch Canadian film and television.

"As soon as Canada makes a few films that get recognized internationally, or break through, or make money, everybody's going to be lining up to get the next one," he says. But we need to do it a couple of times and show people that we're capable of doing it."

"It's like the old thing about being a Canadian band, where you haven't made a career until you're on the radio in the United States. I think the same thing is kind of true here. I think having success in the U.S., having AMC put out the television series, having audiences come and critics really respond positively to it — if we could do that a few more times in Canada, then that's how you shift a perception."

BlackBerry premieres Nov. 9 on CBC and CBC Gem.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Dart is a writer, editor, jiu-jitsu enthusiast, transit nerd, comic book lover, and some other stuff from Scarborough, Ont. In addition to CBC, he's had bylines in The Globe and Mail, Vice, The AV Club, the National Post, Atlas Obscura, Toronto Life, Canadian Grocer, and more.

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BlackBerry Ending Explained: What Really Happened To The Tech Company

The 2023 movie BlackBerry ends with the beginning of the smartphone’s downfall. Once a giant in the industry, the BlackBerry all but disappeared over the last decade; the company doesn’t even make cellular devices anymore. It’s a fitting conclusion to a story that is as much about the meteoric rise of the Canadian tech company as it is about the big personalities — and even bigger gambles — involved. The quiet, subdued dork Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) is both brilliant and clueless. His co-CEO Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) is the polar opposite: a vicious-tempered attack dog with a nose for corporate culture but completely clueless when it comes to tech. Together, they were a powerful, but volatile, force.

Matt Johnson’s 2023 comedy-drama tells the real-life story of Research In Motion Ltd. developing the first personal device capable of sending and receiving emails. This was huge. Thanks to the BlackBerry, we all have gotten used to instant, near-constant access to our email and QWERTY texting. It’s easy to forget that just 2o years ago, online communication mainly required a computer. Cell phones could text, but it involved the painful process of cycling through letters on the numpad. The BlackBerry invented a new way to interact with your cell phone. Unfortunately, the company did not perfect it. The ending of  BlackBerry  explains the company’s downfall, and why this outcome was inevitable.

BlackBerry’s Final Scene Is A Darkly Funny Warning

All throughout  BlackBerry , Mike was obsessed with two things: making his product perfect, and despising the cheap and fast manufacturing in China. To be fair to the film, the latter sentiment has nothing to do with anti-Chinese feelings — it’s the underlying capitalist motivations at play. Any North American company sending their contracts to China is almost certainly doing it to save money, and that can come at the cost of quality control. Mike says as much himself in one of the opening scenes, lamenting that the Chinese-manufactured intercom was carelessly constructed because the powers-at-be didn’t care enough to do it right. Mike, and his company RIM, would do things right.

Unfortunately,  BlackBerry  shows how the conflicting interests of business can cloud one’s judgment in the moment, leading to decisions that go against one’s principles. Not wanting to be usurped by iPhone (and seeming far too personally invested in BlackBerry being “the best” product on the market), Mike impulsively promises Verizon a whole new phone  that didn’t exist. Needing to fulfill this contract with virtually no time for proper development, the device is hobbled together and sent to China for manufacturing. This resulted in the infamous Storm phone, a touchscreen model to compete with the iPhone that was a major embarrassment for RIM.

The last scene in BlackBerry is Mike opening the shipment, and discovering the phone works poorly and has the same buzzing he detected in the Chinese intercom at the beginning of the film. So he fixes the buzz, puts the phone back, and moves on to the next one. Mike stands alone in that dark warehouse, confronting the physical manifestation of his corrupted values; the movie ends with him diligently working through the pile like a resigned Sisyphus. Of course, it would be impossible to fix every single BlackBerry Storm, and that’s the point: the epilogue text explains just how disastrous the defective Storm model was for the company.

What Really Killed The BlackBerry

The movie  BlackBerry  is a dramatic retelling of RIM’s history, and as such, it tweaks some of the historic details. The true story of BlackBerry is that the company still exists — but in a very different form. One thing the movie doesn’t quite capture is just how first-in-class the technology was in terms of security. This is touched on briefly in the film, particularly how Jim’s (potentially incriminating) encrypted messages were completely inaccessible to investigators. For a time, many high-security firms relied on BlackBerry devices. The iPhone came out as a very expensive consumer device; it’s true that it usurped BlackBerry as a status symbol device, but it didn’t have the same appeal for those interested in data security.

Although BlackBerry fell out of fashion in the consumer cellphone market, it’s maintained a reputation for its secure servers and software. However, the real killing blow came not from Apple, but from Google: eventually, the Android operating system caught up with BlackBerry OS. As Ars Technica summarizes, “Unlike the people who developed Android, BlackBerry’s leadership was blindsided by the iPhone’s popularity.” As a result, the BlackBerry OS never meaningfully updated its approach to incorporate the features consumers loved, and eventually became obsolete. In January, 2022, BlackBerry “decommissioned the infrastructure and services” the smartphone once used, committing fully to its new mission of providing cybersecurity products to corporations and governments.

SarahBeaMilner

Sarah Bea Milner is a writer, editor, and folk musician. She often watches movies — sometimes she reviews them too. She has a fierce love of all things "spooky," as well as a deep appreciation for classic cinema and genre films. Sarah is currently a News Editor for Static Media, working on brands like /Film, Tasting Table, The Daily Meal, and Looper. Previously, she worked as a Lead Editor for Valnet Inc. (Screen Rant). She has written for /Film, Exclaim! Magazine, Electric City Magazine, Bluegrass Canada Magazine, Neon Splatter, Screen Rant, and The Gamer.

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The BlackBerry : the inside story of Research in Motion

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Uploaded by Tracey Gutierres on August 25, 2015

BlackBerry Planet: The Story of Research in Motion and the Little Device that Took the World by Storm

ISBN: 978-0-470-15988-0

October 2009

Alastair Sweeny

BlackBerry Planet tells the behind-the-scenes story of how this little device has become the machine that connects the planet. Starting with the early years of Mike Lazaridis’ invention and his founding of RIM at age 23, it details his drive to innovate, developing what was a glorified pager into the essential corporate communicator, used by everyone from dealmakers to the Queen, from movie stars to the entire US Congress. Since 1992, Lazaridis and co-CEO Jim Balsillie together have been the driving force behind the RIM story.

With access to senior staffers and former RIM employees, BlackBerry Planet tells the inside story about the branding and marketing success of the BlackBerry, from its use during 9/11, which earned RIM a reputation for security and reliability, to the cultural adoption of the iconic device as a must-have symbol, to the backlash against the addictive properties of the “CrackBerry,” and the various patent suits RIM has had to fight off – including the five-year court battle that resulted in the largest technology patent settlement in US history.

As the incredible story of the BlackBerry unfolds, and as RIM battles global giants like Nokia and Apple in the emerging super-phone marketplace, users, fans, investors and competitors can look to BlackBerry Planet for the insight and context of where they’ve been, to try and predict where they’re going.

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A new film explains how the smartphone market slipped through BlackBerry's hands

Justin Chang

Jay Baruchel plays Research In Motion co-CEO Mike Lazaridis in the film BlackBerry. IFC Films hide caption

Jay Baruchel plays Research In Motion co-CEO Mike Lazaridis in the film BlackBerry.

Like a lot of people, I'm a longtime iPhone user — in fact, I used an iPhone to record this very review. But I still have a lingering fondness for my very first smartphone — a BlackBerry — which I was given for work back in 2006. I loved its squat, round shape, its built-in keyboard and even its arthritis-inflaming scroll wheel.

Of course, the BlackBerry is now no more . And the story of how it became the hottest personal handheld device on the market, only to get crushed by the iPhone, is told in smartly entertaining fashion in a new movie simply titled BlackBerry.

Briskly adapted from Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff's book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry , this is the latest of a few recent movies, including Tetris and Air , that show us the origins of game-changing new products. But unlike those earlier movies, BlackBerry is as much about failure as it is about success, which makes it perhaps the most interesting one of the bunch.

If you're clinging to an old BlackBerry, it will officially stop working on Jan. 4

It begins in 1996, when Research In Motion is just a small, scrappy company hawking modems in Waterloo, Ontario. Jay Baruchel plays Mike Lazaridis, a mild-mannered tech whiz who's the brains of the operation. His partner is a headband-wearing, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles -loving goofball named Douglas Fregin, played by Matt Johnson, who also co-wrote and directed the movie.

Johnson's script returns us to an era of VHS tapes and dial-up internet, when the mere idea of a phone that could handle emails — let alone games, music and other applications — was unimaginable. That's exactly the kind of product that Mike and Doug struggle to pitch to a sleazy investor named Jim Balsillie, played by a raging Glenn Howerton, from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia .

All Tech Considered

Saying goodbye to blackberry's iconic original keyboard.

Jim knows very little about tech but senses that the Research In Motion guys might be onto something, and he joins their ragtag operation and tries to whip their slackerish employees into shape. And so, after a crucial deal with Bell Atlantic, later to be known as Verizon, the BlackBerry is born. And it becomes such a hit, so addictive among users, that people start calling it the "CrackBerry."

The time frame shifts to the early 2000s, with Research In Motion now based in a slick new office, with a private jet at its disposal. But the mix of personalities is as volatile as ever — sometimes they gel, but more often they clash.

She left her 2007 iPhone in its box for over a decade. It just sold for $63K

Mike, as sweetly played by Baruchel, is now co-CEO, and he's still the shy-yet-stubborn perfectionist, forever tinkering with new improvements to the BlackBerry, and refusing to outsource the company's manufacturing operations to China. Jim, also co-CEO, is the Machiavellian dealmaker who pulls one outrageous stunt after another, whether he's poaching top designers from places like Google or trying to buy a National Hockey League team and move it to Ontario. That leaves Doug on the outside looking in, trying to boost staff morale with Raiders of the Lost Ark movie nights and maintain the geeky good vibes of the company he started years earlier.

As a director, Johnson captures all this in-house tension with an energetic handheld camera and a jagged editing style. He also makes heavy use of a pulsing synth score that's ideally suited to a tech industry continually in flux.

BlackBerry: If You Don't Survive, May You Rest In Peace

The movie doesn't entirely sustain that tension or sense of surprise to the finish; even if you don't know exactly how it all went down in real life, it's not hard to see where things are headed. Jim's creative accounting lands the company in hot water right around the time Apple is prepping the 2007 launch of its much-anticipated iPhone. That marks the beginning of the end, and it's fascinating to watch as BlackBerry goes into its downward spiral. It's a stinging reminder that success and failure often go together, hand in thumb-scrolling hand.

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BlackBerry: The Inside Story of Research in Motion Hardcover – January 1, 2009

• Language English
• Publisher Key Porter Books
• Publication date January 1, 2009
• ISBN-10 1552639401
• ISBN-13 978-1552639405
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Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0082PPCZS
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Key Porter Books (January 1, 2009)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1552639401
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1552639405
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
• #2,192 in Industrial Relations Business
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• #8,072 in Company Business Profiles (Books)

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Rod mcqueen.

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• Frozen shoulder

Frozen shoulder occurs when the connective tissue enclosing the joint thickens and tightens.

Frozen shoulder, also called adhesive capsulitis, involves stiffness and pain in the shoulder joint. Signs and symptoms typically begin slowly, then get worse. Over time, symptoms get better, usually within 1 to 3 years.

Having to keep a shoulder still for a long period increases the risk of developing frozen shoulder. This might happen after having surgery or breaking an arm.

Treatment for frozen shoulder involves range-of-motion exercises. Sometimes treatment involves corticosteroids and numbing medications injected into the joint. Rarely, arthroscopic surgery is needed to loosen the joint capsule so that it can move more freely.

It's unusual for frozen shoulder to recur in the same shoulder. But some people can develop it in the other shoulder, usually within five years.

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Frozen shoulder typically develops slowly in three stages.

• Freezing stage. Any movement of the shoulder causes pain, and the shoulder's ability to move becomes limited. This stage lasts from 2 to 9 months.
• Frozen stage. Pain might lessen during this stage. However, the shoulder becomes stiffer. Using it becomes more difficult. This stage lasts from 4 to 12 months.
• Thawing stage. The shoulder's ability to move begins to improve. This stage lasts from 5 to 24 months.

For some people, the pain worsens at night, sometimes disrupting sleep.

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The shoulder joint is enclosed in a capsule of connective tissue. Frozen shoulder occurs when this capsule thickens and tightens around the shoulder joint, restricting its movement.

It's unclear why this happens to some people. But it's more likely to happen after keeping a shoulder still for a long period, such as after surgery or an arm fracture.

Risk factors

Certain factors may increase the risk of developing frozen shoulder.

Age and sex

People 40 and older, particularly women, are more likely to have frozen shoulder.

Immobility or reduced mobility

People who've had to keep a shoulder somewhat still are at higher risk of developing frozen shoulder. Restricted movement can be the result of many factors, including:

• Rotator cuff injury
• Recovery from surgery

Systemic diseases

People who have certain diseases appear more likely to develop frozen shoulder. Diseases that might increase risk include:

• Overactive thyroid (hyperthyroidism)
• Underactive thyroid (hypothyroidism)
• Cardiovascular disease
• Parkinson's disease

One of the most common causes of frozen shoulder is not moving a shoulder while recovering from a shoulder injury, broken arm or stroke. If you've had an injury that makes it difficult to move your shoulder, talk to your health care provider about exercises that can help you maintain your ability to move your shoulder joint.

• McMahon PJ, et al., eds. Sports medicine: Upper extremity. In: Current Diagnosis & Treatment in Orthopedics. 6th ed. McGraw Hill; 2021. https://accessmedicine.mhmedical.com. Accessed June 18, 2022.
• Frozen shoulder. American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. https://orthoinfo.aaos.org/en/diseases--conditions/frozen-shoulder. Accessed June 14, 2022.
• Prestgaard TA. Frozen shoulder (adhesive capsulitis). https://www.uptodate.com/contents/search. Accessed June 14, 2022.
• Challoumas D, et al. Comparison of treatments for frozen shoulder: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Network Open. 2020; doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.29581.
• Kim YJ. Acupuncture management for acute frozen shoulder: A case report. Clinical Case Reports. 2021; doi:10.1002/ccr3.5055.
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August 22, 2023 feature

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

fact-checked

peer-reviewed publication

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Hydrogel locomotion regulated by light and electric fields

by Thamarasee Jeewandara , Phys.org

Materials scientists aim to develop autonomous materials that function beyond stimulus responsive actuation. In a new report in Science Advances , Yang Yang and a research team in the Center for Bioinspired Energy Science at the Northwestern University, U.S., developed photo- and electro-activated hydrogels to capture and deliver cargo and avoid obstacles on return.

To accomplish this, they used two spiropyran monomers (photoswitchable materials) in the hydrogel for photoregulated charge reversal and autonomous behaviors under a constant electric field. The photo/electro-active materials could autonomously perform tasks based on constant external stimuli to develop intelligent materials at the molecular scale.

Bioengineering a charged hydrogel

Soft materials with life-like functionality have promising applications as intelligent, robotic materials in complex dynamic environments with significance in human-machine interfaces and biomedical devices . Yang and colleagues designed a photo- and electro-activated hydrogel to capture and deliver cargo, avoid obstacles, and return to its point of departure, based on constant stimuli of visible light and applied electricity. These constant conditions provided energy to guide the hydrogel.

The research team covalently integrated spiropyran moieties with varying substituents into the constructs to regulate the net charge of the soft materials. They used finite element simulations to guide the design and movement of the charged hydrogels and engineer 3D surface profiles to maximize the dielectrophoretic effect. Yang and the team further studied the scope of electroactive locomotion and photoactuation in the spiropyran hydrogels.

Charge reversal of spiropyran-functionalized polymers

Yang and colleagues used two different spiropyran molecules with different net charges. They synthesized each of the molecules with a polymerizable methacrylate group based on existing reports .

They incorporated different ratios of the spiropyran molecules into N-isopropylacrylamide polymer chains (PNIPAM) to form hydrogels . In this instance, they tuned the charge reversal functionalities using copolymers of the spiropyran structural units to show photoswitchable potential and charge reversible behaviors with tunable charge. The scientists tuned the charge reversal time by changing the ratio of the two spiropyran moieties, without changing the switching and recovery rates.

Photo-activated electroactive motion of the spiropyran-PNIPAM hydrogels

Based on charge reversal behavior of the polymers, Yang's team photoregulated the electroactive hydrogels by using a crosslinker to prepare them.

At first, the team could positively charge the hydrogel to move towards the cathode under a direct current electric field , where the positive charge transferred from the spiropyran moieties into the hydrogel network. Thereafter, the permanently bound sulfonate groups on the polymer chain made the net charge of the construct negative, allowing the negatively charged hydrogel to navigate back to the anode.

The team studied the photoregulated electroactive locomotion speeds of the hydrogel disks across multiple light-dark cycles to examine their locomotion speed, and determined the relationship between the charge and speed of the hydrogel disks. They based this on the balance between the electrostatic force and hydrodynamic drag force, where the higher applied voltage and larger diameter of the hydrogel disks delivered higher locomotion speed. Such polymeric devices are well-suited to capture and deliver cargo through autonomous hunting.

Capturing and delivering cargo

Yang and colleagues explored the cargo delivery potential of the constructs by engineering simple disk-shaped spiropyran-PNIPAM hydrogels and sphere-shaped constructs embedded with nanoparticles as cargos. The strong dielectrophoretic force allowed the materials to undergo autonomous hunting and picking up functions.

Based on simulations, Yang and colleagues formed a 3-arm spiropyran PNIPAM hydrogel object using photoinitiated free radical polymerization with superior capture capability of the cantilever arms. When uncharged, the electric field gradient around the hydrogel vanished, enabling autonomous cargo release during charge reversal. The cargo release also occurred by turning off the electric field.

Automatically avoiding obstacles

The research team showed how materials with a high dielectric constant induced an attractive electrophoretic force, and materials with a lower dielectric constant exerted a repulsive electrophoretic force on the adjacent charged hydrogel object.

Using finite element calculations , they showed the possibility of low dielectric constants to guide the charged hydrogel through obstacles. Under constant stimuli of the electric field and light irradiation, the hydrogel automatically bypassed barriers and traveled back after charge reversal, without human intervention.

In this way, Yang and colleagues designed a photo- and electroactive hydrogel that can cargo capture and deliver, as well as avoid obstacles under constant external stimuli. The scientists used two different ratios of spiropyran moieties in the hydrogel and facilitated the net charge in the chemically random network to be tunable under irradiation with blue light. This enabled photoregulated, electroactive motion with autonomous behavior under the direction of light and electricity.

The autonomous soft matter products elegantly captured and delivered cargo while avoiding obstacles with applications suited for scenarios to ensure the safety of monitoring a situation from afar—for instance, where human intervention is impractical. These new biomaterials with autonomous functionality can be resourcefully engineered using environmentally sensitive electrostatic interactions and photoactuation in soft materials .

Anne Helene Gelebart et al, Making waves in a photoactive polymer film, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature22987

Journal information: Science Advances , Nature

© 2023 Science X Network

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