BlackBerry vs Nokia

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.

Nokia was founded in 1865 as a wood pulp mill on the banks of the Nokianvirta river in Finland by Fredrik Idestam. The company name came from the river. Nokia later diversified into rubber products — including the rubber boots that became famous across Northern Europe — and then into cables and electronics. By the 1960s, Nokia was a conglomerate making paper, rubber, and consumer electronics with no particular specialisation.

Nokia CEO Jorma Ollila made a radical decision in 1992: sell everything except mobile phones. Nokia divested its paper, rubber, cable, and consumer electronics divisions and bet the entire company on the emerging mobile telecommunications market. It was considered an absurd gamble — Nokia was a minor player in a market dominated by Motorola and Ericsson. By 1998, Nokia was the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, holding over 40% of the global market.

The Nokia 3310, launched in 2000, sold 126 million units and became one of the best-selling consumer products in history. Nokia's ringtone — a melody taken from Francisco Tárrega's "Gran Vals" — was heard over 1.8 billion times per day worldwide. Finland's GDP was meaningfully dependent on Nokia's performance. The company seemed invincible.

Nokia's internal engineers had developed touchscreen prototypes as early as the late 1990s. The company had the technology to build a smartphone years before the iPhone. Internal research predicted that consumers would want internet-connected touchscreen devices. Middle management killed the projects repeatedly, believing they threatened Nokia's existing hardware business. When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in January 2007, Nokia's CEO dismissed it as a niche product. Within five years, Nokia's market share had collapsed from 40% to under 5%.

Microsoft acquired Nokia's mobile phone business in 2013 for $7.2 billion. The acquisition was a disaster. Microsoft wrote down $7.6 billion — more than the purchase price — in 2015, and laid off 25,000 employees. The Nokia brand was sold to HMD Global in 2016. The Nokia 3310 was relaunched as a nostalgia product in 2017. People bought it entirely for sentimental reasons.

Nokia spent 2023-2025 cutting between 9,000 and 14,000 jobs — reducing its global workforce from 86,000 to around 75,600 — as 5G infrastructure spending by telecom operators collapsed after the initial deployment boom. Spending on radio access network products fell from $45 billion in 2022 to $35 billion in 2024. Nokia restructured from five business units into two, hired its first American CEO, and accepted a $1 billion investment from Nvidia to develop 5G and 6G software running on GPUs. The company that had once made rubber boots and then dominated mobile phones was now fighting to survive as a network infrastructure supplier — in a market it had helped create, against rivals who had caught up.