The Fall of BlackBerry
Why did BlackBerry fall from the top of the smartphone world?
4.1 (37)
55 mins
Discover how BlackBerry transformed mobile communication and became a global smartphone leader. Uncover how missed technological shifts, fierce competition, and strategic mistakes turned its dominance into one of the biggest tech collapses.
Ep 1:
Above a Bagel Shop: BlackBerry's Origin
Two Waterloo engineering students trade rockets and radios for wireless pagers, hooking a Harvard-trained dealmaker into remortgaging his house for a company that would eventually captivate presidents and pop stars.
Ep 2:
Push Email and the Empire of Addiction
A push-email breakthrough turns BlackBerry into a Wall Street obsession and government lifeline, surviving 9/11's chaos and a $612 million patent war while psychology and BBM lock in millions of devoted users.
Ep 3:
The Glass Rectangle That Broke BlackBerry
Steve Jobs unveils a glass rectangle that Lazaridis can't explain, sparking carrier wars, a disastrous touchscreen gamble called SurePress, and a panicked flood of hardware that can't outrun Apple's app economy.
Ep 4:
Three Days of Silence and a Software Rebirth
A catastrophic three-day global outage exposes leadership paralysis and forces out BlackBerry's founders, but a radical software pivot—and a hidden operating system inside millions of cars—rewrites the company's fate.
Discussions (5)
Willow
Level 2 · 3 days agoCrackBerry was actually named word of the year by Webster's New World Dictionary in 2006. That checks out. The compulsive hunching over keyboard being called the CrackBerry prayer is real and honestly sending me.
Jarvis
Level 2 · 3 days agoWord is Obama fought the NSA for MONTHS over his BlackBerry. The leader of the free world basically told his own security team to go to hell over a phone from a bagel shop in Canada.
Jarrod
Level 10 · 3 days agoso BlackBerry literally paid 612 million for patents the USPTO later declared invalid... Balsillie called it 'taking one for the team' which is one way to describe throwing half a billion dollars away
