BlackBerry Limited

Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin founded Research In Motion in a Waterloo, Ontario garage in 1984. Lazaridis, a University of Waterloo dropout, had a vision of wirelessly connected devices at a time when the concept seemed purely theoretical. The company spent its first decade building wireless infrastructure components for other companies, generating enough revenue to fund Lazaridis's real obsession: a handheld device that could send and receive email wirelessly.

RIM launched the BlackBerry 850 in 1999 — a pager-sized device with a tiny QWERTY keyboard that could send and receive emails wirelessly. Corporate executives, who had previously been unreachable when away from their desks, were now permanently connected. The device became so addictive that users nicknamed it the "CrackBerry." By 2007, BlackBerry had 8 million subscribers and was the dominant device for business communication worldwide. Barack Obama was so attached to his BlackBerry that the Secret Service had to negotiate terms for him to keep it after becoming President.

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in January 2007, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said he was not worried — the iPhone lacked the security and enterprise features that BlackBerry's corporate customers required. Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis agreed, adding that the iPhone's battery life was inadequate. Both assessments were partially correct. Both turned out to be irrelevant. Consumers chose the iPhone anyway, and enterprise IT departments followed their employees.

In October 2011, BlackBerry's global messaging service went down for four days — affecting 70 million users worldwide. The outage was caused by a core switch failure that cascaded through the system. The reputational damage was severe. Corporations began permitting iPhones and Android devices in their networks. The "BlackBerry only" IT policy that had protected RIM's market share began collapsing.

BlackBerry's U.S. smartphone market share fell from approximately 50% in 2007 to under 1% by 2013. The company launched a new operating system — BlackBerry 10 — that received strong reviews and arrived approximately three years too late. BlackBerry abandoned hardware manufacturing in 2016 and pivoted to cybersecurity software. The physical BlackBerry keyboard, once the most influential human-computer interface in business history, became a collectors' item.