The Rise and Fall of BlackBerry, the $83 Billion Smartphone King That Laughed at the iPhone

In January 2007, Mike Lazaridis was running on a treadmill in Waterloo, Ontario, watching TV, when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Lazaridis ran one of the most powerful companies on Earth: BlackBerry, worth $83 billion, the most valuable company in Canadian history, maker of the most addictive product the tech industry had ever produced. They called it CrackBerry. It was in the hand of every executive, every celebrity, and the President of the United States. And over the next five years, Lazaridis watched it all collapse, because he looked at the iPhone and decided it was a toy. This is the full story of BlackBerry: two founders (Lazaridis the self-taught engineer and Jim Balsillie the Harvard dealmaker who remortgaged his house for a third of the company), an office above a bagel shop, the little keyboard that killed the end of the workday, and the fatal denial. When Jobs revealed the iPhone, Balsillie's response was four words: "It's OK, we'll be fine." Their rushed answer, the touchscreen BlackBerry Storm, came back with a near-100% return rate. And in a boardroom years later, Lazaridis held up a keyboard phone and a touchscreen phone and said, "I get this. I don't get this." By January 2012 the founders were gone, the stock down from $140 to $16. They didn't miss the future. They watched it arrive, and called it a toy. This is Kilobyte Chronicles, where we tell the rise and fall of the machines and companies that shaped how we lived. Chapters: 00:00 The man on the treadmill 01:30 An office above a bagel shop 03:40 The phone that ended the workday 06:00 Laughing at the iPhone 08:20 The Storm and the 100% return rate 09:30 The keyboard that killed them 10:20 They called the future a toy SOURCES (researched from primary/authoritative sources): Jacquie McNish & Sean Silcoff, "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry" (Flatiron Books, 2015) — the definitive account, by Wall Street Journal / Globe and Mail reporters. The Globe and Mail, "How BlackBerry blew it: The inside story" (the treadmill, the boardroom "I get this / I don't get this," the Storm): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/repor... The Canadian Encyclopedia, "Jim Balsillie" (the $125,000 / 33% investment in 1992): https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.c... Wikipedia, "BlackBerry Limited" (founding March 7 1984, RIM, the timeline, exiting hardware, QNX). Biography.com on "Losing the Signal" (Balsillie's "It's OK, we'll be fine"; COO Larry Conlee's "battery drain and a lousy keyboard"). If you spot a genuine error, comment and I'll pin the correction.