Motorola vs BlackBerry

Paul Galvin and his brother Joseph founded the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in Chicago in 1928 with $565 in capital. Their breakthrough came with car radios. They named the product Motorola — a portmanteau of "motor" and "Victrola" — suggesting music in motion. The name became so associated with quality that the company adopted it as its corporate name in 1947.

On April 3, 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first mobile phone call in history from a street corner in New York City. The device weighed 1.1 kilograms and offered 30 minutes of talk time before requiring 10 hours of recharging. Cooper called Joel Engel, his counterpart at AT&T Bell Labs — Motorola's rival in the race to build a portable phone. "Joel," Cooper said, "I'm calling you from a cellular phone, and it's a real cellular phone, a handheld, portable, real cellular phone."

Motorola launched the StarTAC in 1996 — the world's first clamshell mobile phone, weighing just 88 grams. It was the must-have device of the late 1990s. Motorola held over 50% of the U.S. mobile phone market. The company was at its peak. Within a decade, it would be unrecognisable.

Motorola invested $5 billion in Iridium — a satellite phone network requiring 66 low-earth orbit satellites. The concept was visionary: a phone that worked anywhere on earth. The execution was disastrous. By the time Iridium launched in 1998, terrestrial mobile networks had expanded to cover most places where people actually lived. The $3,000 handsets were heavy and could not be used indoors. Iridium filed for bankruptcy in 1999, fourteen months after launch. The U.S. military eventually bought the network for $25 million.

Google acquired Motorola Mobility in 2011 for $12.5 billion — primarily to obtain Motorola's 17,000 mobile patents, which Google needed to defend Android against Apple and Microsoft lawsuits. Google sold Motorola to Lenovo three years later for $2.91 billion, having extracted the patents it needed. The company that had invented the mobile phone was sold for less than a quarter of what Google had paid. Motorola Solutions — the public safety and enterprise communications division — continued separately, becoming a profitable $20 billion company serving police, emergency services, and government agencies. The consumer phone brand lived on as a Lenovo subsidiary, producing budget Android phones with declining relevance.

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.