Dawn Calleja, Report on Business magazine editor.Daniel Ehrenworth/The Globe and Mail
I can still conjure the sound and feel of my first BlackBerry—that oh-so-satisfying click-click-click as my thumbs flew over the keyboard. I admit I was a bit of a late adopter — I was still triple-tapping texts on my flip phone until nearly the mid-2000s. But once I finally upgraded, I became a convert to the Research In Motion religion. That delightful tactility wasn’t the only thrill of owning a BlackBerry, though. It was that the device — then pretty much the hottest piece of consumer tech in the world — came from just down Highway 401 in Waterloo, Ont.
Every Hollywood star, politico and corporate titan had a CrackBerry practically glued to their hands at all times. Beyoncé slept with hers. Drake had one plated in 24-karat gold. When the world economy began to unravel in early 2008, Wall Streeters learned of the collapse of Bear Stearns’s stock via buzzing BlackBerrys carried in holsters on their belts. Barack Obama caused what seemed at the time to be a major national security kerfuffle after he insisted on bringing his beloved BlackBerry to the White House when he took office in 2009 — he just couldn’t live without it.
All of this propelled RIM’s co-founders, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, to phenomenal wealth — at the company’s peak, they were worth billions apiece. Waterloo became a high-tech hub that attracted some of the smartest people in the world.
We all know what happened next, though: The iPhone debuted in 2007, and its touchscreen technology — which Balsillie and Lazaridis initially dismissed — slowly ground BlackBerry and its clickety keyboard into irrelevance. Obama, by the way, clung to his beloved device until 2016, the same year BlackBerry stopped selling handsets altogether.
The company is still around, though it bears little resemblance to the BlackBerry of old, as you’ll read in Sean Silcoff’s story, “Rebirth in motion.” It took nearly a year of requests to persuade the company’s newish Long Island–raised, Dallas-based CEO, John Giamatteo, to sit down for an interview. But Sean finally brought him around — which makes sense, because if there’s one reporter the media-shy chief exec could trust to get the story of BlackBerry’s transformation right, it’s Sean. After all, he literally wrote the book (along with former Globe and Mail reporter Jacquie McNish) on BlackBerry, Losing the Signal, which debuted 10 years ago this month. (The book was very loosely adapted into the laugh-until-you-weep Canadian-produced film BlackBerry, which premiered in 2023.)
I first met Sean back in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, around the same time the first BlackBerry (billed as an email pager) made its chunky debut. He sat in the cubicle across from me at the business magazine where we worked, and his energy level could best be described as Alex P. Keaton in the speed episode of Family Ties.
Sean hasn’t changed all that much in the past 26 years. But BlackBerry sure has — from world-dominating icon to, well, check out the story to find out.
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