BlackBerry

Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin founded Research In Motion in a Waterloo, Ontario garage in 1984. Lazaridis 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. BlackBerry's market share fell from approximately 50% to under 1% in six years.

BlackBerry abandoned smartphone hardware manufacturing in 2016 — ending the device that had defined it — and pivoted entirely to enterprise software and cybersecurity. The company's QNX operating system, which runs in over 235 million vehicles worldwide, became its most valuable asset. BlackBerry also developed cybersecurity software for government and enterprise clients, building a business that was profitable but a fraction of the company's former scale.

By 2025, BlackBerry had transformed into a software company focused on endpoint security, automotive embedded systems, and government cybersecurity — with revenue around $500 million annually. The physical keyboard that had once been the most influential human-computer interface in business history was a collector's item. The company that had been Barack Obama's favourite phone and the most addictive device in corporate history was now a mid-sized software vendor that most of its former users had forgotten entirely.