Latest / The Innovation Show / The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry with Jacquie McNish

Transcript

The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry with Jacquie McNish · The Innovation Show

• 0:00
  Welcome to a new series that we're doing deep dives into Companies.
• 0:04
  And today we're gonna start with Blackberry, the untold story behind
• 0:08
  the rise and fall of Blackberry.
• 0:10
  The book's called Losing the Signal.
• 0:12
  We're joined by the co-author Jacquie McNish.
• 0:14
  Before we start, I wanna thank our sponsor Kyndryl who runs and reimagines the
• 0:19
  technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses.
• 0:23
  With a unique blend of AI powered consulting, , Kyndryl helps leaders
• 0:26
  harness the power of technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation
• 0:31
  and an lasting competitive edge.
• 0:33
  You can also find the Kyndryl Institute app.
• 0:35
  The Kyndryl Institute has amazing thought leadership.
• 0:39
  Some of the brilliant guests we've had on the show, Rita
• 0:42
  McGrath's in there, Paul Sangeet.
• 0:44
  Choudary is in there.
• 0:45
  His article was picked up recently by the ft. The Financial Times.
• 0:49
  You can find out more about RY and the RY Institute at
• 0:52
  K-Y-N-D-R-Y-L ry.com/institute.
• 0:57
  Nearly 1 billion people, a third of the world's population at
• 1:01
  the time, owned smartphones.
• 1:03
  Devices that had not existed a decade earlier, not since the advent of
• 1:08
  network television in the late 1940s.
• 1:10
  Had a new technology been embraced so quickly by consumers.
• 1:14
  The race for market dominance was rapid and brutish.
• 1:18
  A few industry sovereigns, Motorola and Nokia had already toppled.
• 1:22
  Some figured RIM would be the next casualty.
• 1:25
  The latest sign was a botched launch of a playbook tablet to compete with
• 1:30
  apple's spectacularly successful iPad.
• 1:33
  The Playbook had a tiny fraction of the apps that made the iPad so
• 1:37
  popular and in its rush to Market Rim had introduced the tablet
• 1:41
  without its trademark email service.
• 1:44
  Until that October day when Co CEO Jim Balsillie touched down in his
• 1:49
  private jet in Dubai, Blackberry was an improbable success story, the winner
• 1:55
  of one of the wildest most disruptive technology races of the past century.
• 2:00
  For three days in October, 2011, rim customers were forced to
• 2:04
  go cold Turkey, no Blackberry.
• 2:07
  Or CrackBerry as it was called.
• 2:10
  Where did, everybody go?
• 2:12
  Life seemed impossible when the outage ended users were as committed to mobile
• 2:17
  messaging for Research In Motion.
• 2:20
  However, it was a different story.
• 2:22
  Rim was losing the signal to its market that it has created.
• 2:28
  That's an excerpt from today's book, losing The Signal, the Spectacular
• 2:33
  Rise and Fall of Blackberry.
• 2:35
  We are joined by the author of that, and some of you have seen the Magnificent
• 2:39
  movie co-author along w Sean Silcoff.
• 2:43
  Jacquie McNish welcome to the show.
• 2:46
  Thank you for having me.
• 2:47
  It's great to have you, Jackie.
• 2:49
  Absolutely love the book.
• 2:50
  So many little nuances that were skipped in the pithy stories you hear about
• 2:56
  the failure of these two brilliant business people and the real human story
• 3:01
  behind all of this disruption as well.
• 3:03
  But I'd love to start where I teed you up there when Balsillie touches
• 3:08
  down in Dubai and what happened next.
• 3:11
  It's, really quite a dramatic moment you couldn't have invented.
• 3:14
  It's almost cinematic.
• 3:15
  You can see him sitting on his private jet.
• 3:18
  They've just landed in Dubai for big telecommunications conference.
• 3:22
  He's loaded with special elite phones that he's gonna give to the various
• 3:27
  emirs and, leading business people.
• 3:29
  And he goes to his Blackberry and he looks for that little ladder that we still have
• 3:33
  on cellular phones with that little ladder of lights showing you that you've got
• 3:38
  a wifi connection, and it's not there.
• 3:41
  And he is thinking, what's going on?
• 3:43
  Why don't I have a signal?
• 3:44
  Is it my phone's slapping around?
• 3:46
  It's not working.
• 3:48
  And as they're, taxiing up to the airport.
• 3:53
  He gets a call from Mike Lazaridis, his partner, co-founded Blackberry with him.
• 3:59
  And Mike is back in Waterloo, Ontario at their head office.
• 4:04
  And he's very grave voice.
• 4:05
  And he says, Mike, the network is down.
• 4:08
  And Jim goes, okay, the network's down.
• 4:10
  That's okay.
• 4:11
  We've got lots of networks.
• 4:12
  No, Jim, the whole network is down.
• 4:14
  And what they would discover is that they had their own private network,
• 4:19
  which was unusual for a carrier for a maker of cell phones or any technology.
• 4:27
  And that was part of Mike Lazaridis's efforts to keep it secure and to
• 4:32
  keep the messages encrypted, which made businesses very comfortable
• 4:37
  with having these networks and these phones used by their, employees.
• 4:42
  And he says, it's all down.
• 4:44
  And it started in Slough, in Britain.
• 4:46
  Where they had a giant operation of servers that routed all the messages
• 4:52
  from back and forth all over the world.
• 4:54
  And one of the servers stopped working, which is normal, so you have a backup.
• 5:01
  And then the backup wasn't working properly and it kept trying
• 5:06
  to route the messages and as a result blew out the whole system.
• 5:11
  So the entire computing system was out and within hours, the entire
• 5:17
  network around the world was gone.
• 5:19
  And for a number of days, people who were addicted to their blackberries
• 5:24
  had no blackberry, no working Blackberry, they couldn't communicate.
• 5:27
  And there was poor Jim in in, in an Arab convention where everyone
• 5:33
  just wanted to have the newest and the best haranguing him, when am I
• 5:37
  gonna be able to use my blackberry?
• 5:39
  That they was so addictive they, couldn't deal with the withdrawal.
• 5:43
  And he was there to give a keynote.
• 5:45
  I can imagine like many of us have given keynotes and you turn
• 5:49
  up and you're worried that the technology won't attach maybe for
• 5:53
  your presentation, but this is the.
• 5:55
  Yes, He was excruciating, and Jim just basically left and went back while
• 6:01
  they, tried to solve it, which they did, and in the end, it wasn't their fault.
• 6:06
  The routers, which were made by someone else weren't working, and
• 6:09
  there was a massive quiet settlement to, to deal with that problem.
• 6:14
  You and I were talking before we came on air and I was like going,
• 6:17
  damn, we need to record this.
• 6:19
  And we were talking about a few things.
• 6:20
  Firstly, I was congratulating you on the great success of the book, but also
• 6:24
  how the movie got picked up as well.
• 6:26
  And you, said something beautiful.
• 6:28
  You're like, life sometimes just puts these things in your way,
• 6:33
  unforeseen events connect and all of a sudden you have a movie.
• 6:37
  But equally, that's what happened for RIM and these two unlikely founders coming
• 6:43
  from very different backgrounds and actually very humble backgrounds as well.
• 6:47
  They weren't afforded the world, they weren't entitled in any way,
• 6:51
  but they really went after things.
• 6:52
  I'd love you to give us a background to these two gentlemen
• 6:56
  who, who made this company.
• 6:58
  They are definitely the original odd couple in the technology field.
• 7:04
  Because usually the people behind great technological inventions often have a
• 7:11
  background in some form of engineering or mathematics or science, and that
• 7:17
  certainly describes Mike Lazaridis who had his own work bench since he was a
• 7:23
  young child, had that wonderful book, the Boy Electrician, and he he would invent
• 7:29
  his own communications network that with wires going out of his bedroom to a
• 7:33
  friend down the street where they would communicate at night and during the day.
• 7:37
  So he was very much that kind of person.
• 7:39
  Very interested in math.
• 7:41
  And he was at a high school where they had this is a two classes.
• 7:44
  One was the academics and the lower class was people who worked in the shops
• 7:48
  who were gonna have working class jobs.
• 7:50
  And he was allowed to do both.
• 7:52
  And when power systems broke, he was the guy who fixed it.
• 7:56
  was, he had the good fortune of having teachers who understood
• 8:01
  that computers were coming.
• 8:02
  And one of his, teachers, Mr. Masinsky, said anyone who can figure out how
• 8:07
  to connect, computers with mobile communications is gonna be something.
• 8:12
  And that always stuck with him.
• 8:13
  So he was the boy inventor who became the founder of Research in Motion,
• 8:19
  Balsallie, totally different background.
• 8:20
  He grew up in Peterborough, Ontario, which is just north of Toronto.
• 8:25
  And working class family.
• 8:27
  His father was of Metis descent, which is an indigenous tribal group in Canada.
• 8:33
  At a time when people kept that, quiet.
• 8:36
  And so he grew up feeling somewhat ashamed of his family background.
• 8:41
  He didn't particularly excel in school.
• 8:44
  Lippy, scrappy kid, always getting into fights.
• 8:47
  The seminal moment for him came in, I believe it was high school when his
• 8:52
  math teacher was struggling at the board trying to do a complex formula.
• 8:55
  And he said, where did I go wrong?
• 8:57
  This voice comes from the back of this C and says you were born.
• 9:03
  He was dragged outta class, pushed against a locker and said, you are
• 9:07
  never coming in my class again.
• 9:09
  You have to go to the library and you're gonna learn math yourself.
• 9:12
  The teacher, assuming he was gonna fail.
• 9:14
  And that was like one of those moments in his life where he had a choice.
• 9:19
  He could just give up on school, but instead he got really mad.
• 9:22
  And I'm gonna show him how wrong he is.
• 9:24
  And he really worked hard to study, did well in math.
• 9:28
  He took the provincial exam and actually won it for a student from Peterborough.
• 9:33
  That's pretty unusual.
• 9:35
  And Jim got a taste of success.
• 9:38
  He got a taste of ambition and he became a very different person.
• 9:42
  He became nerdy in his own way about school, how to study, how
• 9:48
  to maximize the intake and just became very successful in school.
• 9:55
  And he developed a plan where he was gonna go to the best school
• 9:58
  university in Canada, which was Trinity College at University of Toronto.
• 10:02
  He went on to Harvard and he followed a career path that if you went and worked
• 10:07
  for an accounting firm you could then make your way up the corporate ladder.
• 10:12
  And the, he did join a, an accounting firm and learned one that he didn't
• 10:17
  wanna be an accountant, and he learned two in the age of, electronic
• 10:23
  spreadsheets and computerized, for the accounting profession.
• 10:28
  He got to know that stuff really fast.
• 10:30
  So he was at the deal table with the leading accountants doing deals, and
• 10:34
  they relied on him to tell him how do you use these spreadsheet things?
• 10:37
  And he became quite gifted at that.
• 10:39
  And he realized that technology could change the rules.
• 10:43
  It could give him opportunities that he otherwise wouldn't have had access to.
• 10:47
  It was interesting for me that Lazaridis, Jackie was coached me on how to.
• 10:52
  say Lazaridis.
• 10:55
  Lazaridis was, a reader and so was Balsillie.
• 10:59
  So Sly read the seminal 1975 study of canada's cozy business, aristocracy
• 11:05
  called the Canadian Establishment.
• 11:08
  And that implanted a way for him to get to the top and as you say, to be somebody.
• 11:14
  Yes.
• 11:15
  That was an important moment, just like the boy electrician was for Lazaridis,
• 11:19
  he also then followed the Art of War as a way to behave as a businessman.
• 11:27
  I think that you have to think of him like, it's so interesting, like
• 11:32
  Mike could have thought of himself as the underdog, but he never did.
• 11:35
  Mike had self-confidence, great sense of knowledge and fascination in technology.
• 11:44
  And, how he developed by reading the grades, being involved in
• 11:49
  the technology and testing it.
• 11:51
  Jim.always, I think, had a bit of insecurity, that kid from
• 11:55
  Peterborough who certainly didn't fit in in the elite levels.
• 11:59
  And at that time in Canada, business was a very small world and it was
• 12:03
  dominated by big families and it was pretty hard to break through.
• 12:08
  And so I think he always had a degree of insecurity about his place in the
• 12:11
  corporate world in the early days.
• 12:13
  I don't know how Sun Zu came into his life, but Sun Zus book, the Art
• 12:17
  of War became very important to him because I think he approach, you
• 12:20
  could say he approached business from a position of this is war, they're
• 12:25
  out to get to me . For us today.
• 12:27
  That's a bit of a cliche, but for him, that was an important tool for him,
• 12:32
  it helped him organize this thicket of corporate competition,
• 12:38
  elitism and all of that.
• 12:41
  and it helped him a lot.
• 12:41
  And I think the central tenet that was most important to him was, take
• 12:46
  your opponent to uneven ground.
• 12:49
  And you can if you look at the story of the rise of blackberry and the challenges,
• 12:54
  everyone everyone was out to kill this little company to get their modems and
• 12:58
  to get the basis of the technology that led to the very addictive blackberry.
• 13:05
  And so he, never stopped.
• 13:07
  He never stopped.
• 13:10
  Thinking of ways of outsmarting organizations, people
• 13:14
  that he viewed as threats.
• 13:16
  We talked about both of these co-CEOs being readers, and these
• 13:21
  books having an immense influences on how they thought about the world.
• 13:25
  It's one of the reasons I do the show for myself as well.
• 13:28
  It's changed my life, reading.
• 13:30
  You as an author has changed other people's lives.
• 13:33
  And I think that when you read a book like this and you see the very, you
• 13:38
  can see it retrospectively, but you get an insight because you had access
• 13:43
  to Jim Balsillie, which was unusual.
• 13:46
  And if other readers, then other people, their business people
• 13:49
  pick up that book and read it and take the time to read it mostly.
• 13:54
  They can actually avoid or at least be aware of so many of the biases and
• 13:59
  fallacies, and foibles of just being a human, particularly when you're busy
• 14:03
  and particularly when you're successful.
• 14:05
  That's certainly true and we got a lot of interest all over the world
• 14:09
  from people, particularly in the technology and the consulting area.
• 14:14
  And the senior executives at Amazon, Jeff Bezos, bought a number of the
• 14:20
  books and regarded this as lessons to be learned the risks, about the way you deal
• 14:29
  with crises or don't deal with crises.
• 14:33
  And viewed it as a learning experience.
• 14:36
  And Amazon is, a good comparison 'cause it was based it started off as
• 14:41
  a, book selling company that became.
• 14:44
  This great empire in data management and online consumer purchases.
• 14:50
  And who knows where the next new thing is gonna come from.
• 14:54
  That can challenge the existing technology.
• 14:58
  And that is the nature of this business because the lifespan is not a long one
• 15:03
  unless you are constantly evolving and changing and adapting all the new forces.
• 15:09
  I find that such an important insight that, and again we'll
• 15:13
  see this hopefully with the story as It unfolds, is that both.
• 15:17
  Both, CEOs became preoccupied with their success, but also fighting
• 15:22
  lawsuits, et cetera, and that using up their personal bandwidth, excuse
• 15:26
  the pun, led them to miss things or to under deliver on products, product
• 15:32
  quality or rush things to market as a result of just running outta time.
• 15:37
  And that's such an amazing thing with innovation.
• 15:41
  People run outta time.
• 15:42
  But let's bring it back to the spine of the story.
• 15:45
  So how Lazaridis and Balsillie overlap was Balsillie took an unusual job.
• 15:52
  He dropped out of accounting, as you said, and he went to this company,
• 15:55
  Sullivan Schultz, where, Sutherland Schultz where the owner Brock gave
• 16:01
  him access because he liked him.
• 16:03
  He saw him as this kind of protege and he was trying to grow him.
• 16:08
  But equally then he was going to sell the company.
• 16:10
  And this left him with a dilemma.
• 16:13
  It is an important fork in the road for Jim Balsillie,
• 16:16
  because he actually met Brock.
• 16:18
  And who was the the primary owner of Sutherland Schultz in Kitchener Waterloo
• 16:26
  area when he was just graduating from Harvard having finished his,
• 16:31
  MBA and at that time most graduates wanted to go to work on Wall Street.
• 16:36
  That's where you started.
• 16:37
  You worked for one of the big firms, and then you could move from there, into deal
• 16:40
  making or leadership in a corporation.
• 16:43
  So he met Rick Rock, a guy who was also from, a community
• 16:48
  outside of Toronto in Ontario.
• 16:50
  And they spent a night drinking together in Boston.
• 16:54
  And, through the course of the evening, Brock had come work for me.
• 16:58
  And then they talked to each other on the phone the next morning and Jim said
• 17:03
  do you remember that deal you offered?
• 17:06
  And I think that Jim decided that's where he wanted to go.
• 17:09
  He could be a bigger fish in a smaller firm.
• 17:11
  He really liked Brock, their friends to this day.
• 17:15
  And he thought this would be a good start for me.
• 17:17
  I could learn how to be a manager at a company.
• 17:19
  It's a technology business and I can really learn from this.
• 17:24
  So he did that and it was a, it surprised everyone that he knew in the school and in
• 17:30
  past encounters because he was a made guy.
• 17:33
  He's going to, but he, I think he understood that he was not necessarily
• 17:39
  wall Street material and that this is, it's important to work with someone that
• 17:44
  you respect and he could learn about manufacturing and that was fate for him.
• 17:50
  We mentioned the Art of War thing, which just comes up time and time
• 17:52
  again, but he also treated everybody.
• 17:58
  Not so pleasantly by the looks of things or as you, when
• 18:00
  you read between the lines.
• 18:02
  And when Brock, Rick Brock went to sell his company, he was trying
• 18:06
  to give him a lifeline to maybe lead a different organization.
• 18:10
  And that organization, the VCs or whoever was buying it was like going yeah, this
• 18:15
  is a deal except we don't want Balsiilie.
• 18:18
  And it was a very dramatic moment in, in the story because Brock and
• 18:23
  Jim having Brock was the primary owner of the company, so he made
• 18:27
  the deal and they were, it's a Dutch company, and they were driving to a
• 18:34
  hunting camp in Ontario for a break.
• 18:37
  And he had one of those early car phones where you could just turn it
• 18:42
  on so that you could hear it the voice over the speaker in the car system.
• 18:48
  The Dutch people said, the deal is done, we're gonna go ahead,
• 18:51
  but we're not gonna take Jim.
• 18:52
  We don't want him.
• 18:53
  And Jim was sitting in the car next to him and that was a very
• 18:56
  devastating moment for Jim.
• 18:59
  One, one that was difficult for him to understand because in his
• 19:03
  mind he was doing everything he could to help this company grow.
• 19:07
  And Jim, his heart at that time was still that scrappy kid do it
• 19:13
  to them before they do it to you.
• 19:14
  That was his way of surviving in the corporate world.
• 19:18
  And he didn't have a lot of friends in the company.
• 19:22
  And for the the, for the Dutch, they viewed him as a disruptive
• 19:26
  force in the negative sense.
• 19:28
  Whereas Jim would tell you in technology, you have to be disruptive.
• 19:33
  But that was that was a very hard moment for Jim and as a result, he
• 19:38
  needed to find something else to do.
• 19:39
  So yes, a small division was gonna be spun off.
• 19:43
  was going to be.
• 19:44
  He was going to be overseeing that.
• 19:47
  he knew Mike at that point because they were selling some sort of
• 19:51
  radio based systems for keeping track of how the, manufacturing was
• 19:58
  working, the shipments, all of that.
• 20:00
  And he went to go visit Mike in his very small, cramped office above a bagel store
• 20:04
  in Kitchener, Waterloo like a frat house when he walked in there started to talk
• 20:10
  about Mike about buying the business.
• 20:13
  And was a bit of a process before that happened.
• 20:17
  Lazaridis, then for his part he gets his route into wireless data
• 20:23
  through carriers and this thing called the mobitech Network.
• 20:27
  And I thought this was inter interesting to bring it back
• 20:30
  to the point of life throws you lemons and what you do with them.
• 20:35
  And this was he was working for this company essentially assembling a network.
• 20:42
  And then that company pulled out and he was left with
• 20:44
  these assets, this capability.
• 20:47
  And it was about how he would use that capability.
• 20:49
  And this was really the, origin from, my reading of it actually, where actually
• 20:54
  we can do something with this ourselves.
• 20:56
  Maybe we'll pick up the story from there.
• 20:58
  When Mike started his company with his childhood friend Doug Fregin, he was very
• 21:03
  much focused on the concept of combining mobile communications with computing.
• 21:11
  He and Doug tried early iterations or cash register could communicate
• 21:19
  with other technologies.
• 21:21
  And it was small stuff that wasn't important at that time.
• 21:25
  Nobody was lining up to buy it.
• 21:27
  He did work in manufacturing that helped him keep track of what
• 21:32
  was being completed, packaged, and going in different areas,
• 21:36
  but it was never a big success.
• 21:38
  So he really kept his mind focused on modems because he knew that's was
• 21:44
  gonna be the technology that allowed mobile communications to happen.
• 21:49
  So they were working very hard on it.
• 21:51
  And if if you went into Mike's office and above the bagel store and Kitchener back
• 21:55
  then you would've thought you'd taken a wrong turn and ended up in a frat house
• 21:58
  because it was a bunch of guys on desks that were made out of doors with wires
• 22:03
  connected everywhere, in the bathroom.
• 22:06
  It just it was, a very humble setting for a bunch of very creative
• 22:12
  guys trying to figure this out.
• 22:15
  when Jim learned from Mike what he had and that they were close to creating
• 22:21
  these modems that were working and that would allow for that kind of, of digital
• 22:26
  communications, he became very interested.
• 22:29
  At the time, Mike Lazaridis was pretty much outta money and it looks
• 22:32
  like they weren't gonna succeed.
• 22:33
  They had a big contract with a US company who was gonna buy a lot of
• 22:37
  modems, they did the, Darwinian thing, which is that they canceled the order,
• 22:42
  which left them having spent all this money, that they needed the money.
• 22:46
  And so Jim mortgaged his house to, to develop this partnership with Mike.
• 22:51
  And the money was gone like the next day 'cause they had so many bills to pay.
• 22:55
  It taught Jim that lesson with just the, these bigger guys are just
• 22:59
  cutthroat, they're out to get you.
• 23:01
  So Jim was exactly what Mike needed at that point.
• 23:05
  In fact, at one point before Mike hired him, said, you've
• 23:09
  gotta meet my wife, Ophelia.
• 23:11
  And they had dinner together and Jim went his way and Ophelia and Mike left
• 23:18
  together and she said he's a shark.
• 23:21
  Mike said he's gonna be my shark.
• 23:23
  And he recognized that he needed that.
• 23:26
  So then they're in bed together after Ophelia's warning and they struggle.
• 23:33
  They struggle for a long time.
• 23:34
  So this is a chapter you nicely call after the Be gees staying alive.
• 23:39
  So it lurches through near misses.
• 23:41
  There's constant cash pressure and rough economics of hardware
• 23:45
  and carrier dependency.
• 23:47
  And one of the things that really came to mind here reading this was
• 23:51
  how political the landscape was here and how that Sun Tzu's Art of War
• 23:58
  was probably right in many ways.
• 24:00
  That it was very cutthroat and there was a lot of of deals that were just used and
• 24:06
  including this happened to this team where they were given a massive contract in
• 24:11
  order to just use up all their bandwidth.
• 24:14
  Not only that, but to leave them hanging.
• 24:15
  Having spent all that money, all the money that Mike had
• 24:19
  on these, on this technology.
• 24:22
  They were left high and dry and the company that was supposed to buy it
• 24:26
  made it very clear that they were very interested in the patent behind this.
• 24:30
  And Mike and Jim were of the view that they tried to
• 24:33
  bankrupt them to get the patent.
• 24:36
  I don't know if that's true or not, you can see that it was unusual behavior
• 24:42
  to have this contract and then cancel It It was a tough business environment.
• 24:48
  So Jim people will say in hindsight, he was sneaky, he was
• 24:52
  difficult, he was unpredictable.
• 24:55
  But how Jim kept the company alive.
• 24:58
  And Mike wasn't that kind of a shark, right?
• 25:01
  He just, he wanted to be in the lab inventing, and Jim had to be
• 25:06
  very wily to outsmart these much bigger threatening companies.
• 25:11
  It's also interesting when you read the book to see how other successful
• 25:16
  companies were managing and actually the seeds of their own downfall.
• 25:20
  Mo Motorola, for example, opened a new market with a tango, a pager, and Nokia
• 25:27
  had this thing, the 9,000 communicator, and as you say, it was a book sized tool
• 25:31
  that looked like a cell phone strapped to a mini keyboard board, but you could
• 25:35
  see the origins of these new devices.
• 25:39
  And then there was the great nemesis of Rim eventually, which was both nemesis
• 25:44
  of of US robotics, who were the company who led rim down the garden path.
• 25:51
  But this was also Palm, and Palm was an interesting player and an
• 25:55
  important part in the whole story.
• 25:58
  Yeah.
• 25:58
  Palm at the time was run by Carl Yankowski.
• 26:01
  He was the CEO very charismatic guy.
• 26:06
  Who if you sat down and talked to him, would tell you how he'd won several
• 26:10
  gold medals at the Olympics, had the world's most expensive cars and jets
• 26:14
  seeming he was a real character.
• 26:16
  Very different from Mike and Jim.
• 26:19
  And at the time, Palm was really hot because they had created a mobile
• 26:25
  device that could connect you with your computer and you would have access to
• 26:30
  your calendar and you could do some data communications with your calendar
• 26:36
  on your handheld device to adjust it.
• 26:39
  And you also had a list of your contacts.
• 26:41
  So that was today it seems like nothing, but that was a really
• 26:45
  big step back in those days.
• 26:47
  And they looked at Blackberry and they saw that, we could do this as well,
• 26:52
  we could bring emails to the Palm.
• 26:56
  And he just, they just, Mike and Jim saw him for what he was with, which
• 27:02
  was just a big brash braggart that was trying to charm them, thinking
• 27:09
  that he could out charm these small timers from Kitchener Waterloo.
• 27:13
  But they were very sharp and they were at the time, they were really connected.
• 27:18
  Mike and Jim could almost read each other's minds and they,
• 27:21
  had, they, they settled on this.
• 27:24
  They were not gonna sell anything to him.
• 27:25
  They were gonna go along with it, but they, started playing this game with
• 27:29
  him because if Jim said I was on the Olympic hockey team of Canada, which
• 27:35
  was a lie Carl would say, oh, me too.
• 27:38
  I won nine gold medals.
• 27:40
  It just, it's just one upmanship.
• 27:42
  And they led him along and he thought that he had them, and then they dumped him.
• 27:47
  So they just left him.
• 27:48
  So they that it's a fun moment.
• 27:52
  It's not the kind of way a lot of people would wanna run business,
• 27:55
  but it, they felt they were left with no choice and all they had was
• 27:59
  the ability to outsmart predators.
• 28:02
  And that was a very good example, humorous of how they were able to keep palm at bay.
• 28:08
  Another couple of players we should probably mention in the story are
• 28:12
  Ram Mobile, RAM, and BellSouth.
• 28:15
  And this eventually led to this moment where a game changing moment in the entire
• 28:21
  story where Lazaridis had written this basically roadmap for the future of mobile
• 28:27
  messaging called Success Lies in Paradox.
• 28:30
  Maybe fill in the gaps of how we get here.
• 28:33
  The paradox of success, as I understand it, was based on
• 28:38
  the notion that less is more.
• 28:40
  Because a lot of the big technology companies were trying to do a
• 28:44
  lot with mobile communications.
• 28:45
  You could have your calendars, you could have your email, you could
• 28:48
  have a whole bunch of things.
• 28:50
  And he felt that simplicity was important.
• 28:53
  And this is a really, important element in the success of Blackberry.
• 28:58
  In the early days, in those days were very primitive.
• 29:03
  The MobX network created by Ericsson was one of the few
• 29:07
  working data communication systems.
• 29:11
  It's one of the few ways that you could get data across the, wires
• 29:15
  so that you could communicate.
• 29:16
  And Mike, you could call a conservative engineer.
• 29:21
  that perspective, that sense of the limits of the networks is I think
• 29:26
  what led to the success of Blackberry.
• 29:29
  If you think of what was happening before then, apple, IBM, Palm, all these people
• 29:35
  that tried create mobile communicators wanted to cram big things into it,
• 29:42
  but the networks couldn't support it.
• 29:45
  Apple famously had the Newton the of the.
• 29:51
  early device where you could write on it and it would send a message
• 29:54
  across the wires, which led to the famous Doonesbury cartoon of a guy
• 29:58
  receiving a message saying egg freckles.
• 30:01
  Because the systems couldn't haKyndryle guys cramming what they thought their
• 30:07
  products should be on the networks.
• 30:09
  Mike was a conservationist.
• 30:11
  He understood the limits and less is more two ways.
• 30:14
  One, it was gonna be a very simple device.
• 30:18
  Through several iterations, but it ended up being very small, a small keyboard
• 30:22
  that you could operate with your thumbs.
• 30:24
  It was I don't know if you remember getting your first emails on a,
• 30:28
  Blackberry, but you would get two from subject line and maybe one sentence,
• 30:33
  and there'd be a little word more at the bottom, and you would click
• 30:38
  that and that was a message to the network to send more data to you.
• 30:42
  And nobody else figured that out.
• 30:43
  And I think this, is important.
• 30:46
  in the success.
• 30:47
  Early success of Blackberry was he understood the limits of the, system,
• 30:52
  and he worked with that and made it work.
• 30:54
  And eventually the carriers started to enhance their mobile
• 30:59
  network so that you could do more.
• 31:01
  But that is, to me, one of the most important elements that Mike
• 31:04
  understood that made it work for them.
• 31:07
  I'm glad you called that out because I felt in a way that you see with so many
• 31:11
  brilliant innovators that once they create a way that works, they create
• 31:16
  path dependency, mental path dependency.
• 31:18
  This is how it works, and then.
• 31:21
  The environment changes or some other technology like
• 31:24
  we're seeing today with ai.
• 31:25
  But like some other technology, like the carriers change the ability to
• 31:30
  send bigger packets of data changes.
• 31:35
  And this is why I'm fast forwarding a bit here.
• 31:38
  This is why they just couldn't get their head around the iPhone when it came around
• 31:42
  because Jobs had done a deal with the carrier singular, in particular in the
• 31:47
  US to be the sole provider of the iPhone.
• 31:50
  But when Lazaridis looked at it, he couldn't understand how are
• 31:54
  they doing this and how are they allowed to do this by the carrier.
• 31:58
  I think you're absolutely right, and I think that is the most important juncture.
• 32:03
  In for Blackberry, because they had all the success.
• 32:07
  They were selling like crazy.
• 32:08
  There was no end in sight to demand for their product.
• 32:13
  Steve Jobs had two things going for him.
• 32:16
  One, he had a huge audience of fans.
• 32:20
  When the first iPhone came out, it was called the Jesus phone.
• 32:25
  And that was because of the enormous following that he had for his technology.
• 32:32
  So he had an embedded audience that was open to this.
• 32:36
  And secondly, you're absolutely right, he changed the game because he did
• 32:40
  a $4 billion deal with Cingular that made it worth their while to invest in
• 32:48
  the networks to increase the capacity to do what Steve Jobs wanted to do.
• 32:54
  Mike , right when he watched Steve Jobs speak at this conference in San
• 32:58
  Francisco that's an impossibility because he was talking about videos, photos
• 33:04
  maps, all these things that you could not then possibly do on the networks.
• 33:09
  It would've crashed the system, and it was a battle.
• 33:11
  Blackberry always faced.
• 33:13
  It kept adding thousands and hundreds of thousands of new customers every day
• 33:17
  behind the backs of the carriers, and their systems were crashing because even
• 33:22
  the simple use of the Blackberry, too many users was crashing their system.
• 33:27
  What they didn't understand is that big multimillion billion dollar deal
• 33:32
  created the basis for new, stronger, more robust networks that could do
• 33:37
  what Steve Jobs wanted with the iPhone.
• 33:40
  And if you lived in New York when the first iPhone came out, you were
• 33:44
  really mad at Apple because the system was crashing all the time.
• 33:47
  AT&T couldn't keep up with the demand, but it eventually got there.
• 33:53
  I think that's such an important aspect in it all in that, 'cause you show
• 33:57
  that with companies like Nokia as well.
• 33:59
  They tried to do this.
• 34:01
  And it was almost like they had created this mental block.
• 34:05
  It's like that saying, oh, we tried that already, but you try that already.
• 34:10
  And then this, the environment, the business environment changes or some
• 34:13
  surrounding technology changes that enables you to go we tried that already,
• 34:18
  but the world's changed and that was a huge blocker just for everybody.
• 34:22
  But to rewind now back, we're back in 1997, it's October and
• 34:28
  Balsillie had parlayed Bell South's commitment to buy this phone, the
• 34:32
  Bullfrog, which came after Leapfrog.
• 34:35
  And this instilled the idea of A an IPO and they tried to do
• 34:39
  this on Toronto Stock Exchange.
• 34:41
  It wasn't that interesting really at the time, because it
• 34:45
  wasn't usually what was there.
• 34:46
  There wasn't tech in Canada really at the time.
• 34:49
  But what was interesting there was that RIM realized they had to also
• 34:54
  change the game, like you said, with that more button that they actually
• 34:57
  had to have technology behind to build an ecosystem, and everybody
• 35:02
  else was just playing in their lane.
• 35:06
  And that was a game changer for rim.
• 35:08
  I think that Mike and Jim together agreed on a system that was quite unique and
• 35:15
  that was that Blackberry was gonna build its own network, it was gonna have the
• 35:20
  servers it was gonna own, or have control of the servers that sent their messages.
• 35:27
  All their messages would be encrypted because they understood from the
• 35:30
  beginning that the market for their blackberries or early blackberries.
• 35:34
  Were going to be people, business people, particularly salespeople,
• 35:38
  people who had to leave the office and hated getting on their laptops
• 35:43
  or whatever at the end of the day and having to go through 50, 60 emails.
• 35:48
  And that was their market.
• 35:49
  And in order to get that business, because very few IT managers in those days were
• 35:55
  comfortable letting anyone outside the company manage their communications.
• 36:00
  So they had to prove that they could provide security.
• 36:03
  And that was through their network operating, facilities in SLO and London
• 36:08
  and Toronto, the United States, all over the world, where their, as their audience
• 36:12
  grew, they were secure, they were safe.
• 36:16
  And so that gave them an enormous advantage in selling
• 36:21
  these to the corporate world.
• 36:23
  And lots of security.
• 36:26
  And in addition to this, they made a lot of money.
• 36:29
  And this was Jim Balsillie's idea, which was they would charge a service
• 36:33
  fee to the users to get money and and on good years, we're talking billions
• 36:39
  of dollars that would come from this.
• 36:41
  So it was, I think originally done to get the business, but it became a very
• 36:47
  successful model and very unique 'cause no one else was ever really able to do it.
• 36:51
  And it no longer exists.
• 36:54
  So this was this central relay hub and also encrypted, which
• 36:59
  was a really important thing.
• 37:00
  But I just wanted to mention one thing that, again, you wouldn't think of unless
• 37:04
  you're working in a startup perhaps, but the pressure that Lazaridis put on his
• 37:10
  team and, particular you'd mentioned this guy, Mousseau, and it came to mind the
• 37:14
  other day, Jackie, my son, asked me, he said, do elephants sleep standing up?
• 37:19
  And I was like that's a great question.
• 37:20
  So I looked it up and it's actually they do both.
• 37:23
  So they stand sleep standing up if they feel they're not fully protected,
• 37:30
  if they feel in any way threatened or say if they're in a zoo or
• 37:34
  whatever, they'll sleep lying down.
• 37:36
  And I, it reminded me of this guy, Mousseau,
• 37:39
  . 'cause you mentioned that he fell asleep on the, at the computer
• 37:42
  one day with his eyes open.
• 37:43
  He was working so hard.
• 37:45
  Yeah, no that was, was, a lot of comradery in the Kitchener Waterloo head
• 37:51
  office, particularly in the tech sector.
• 37:54
  He was one of the many characters that populated RIM in the early
• 37:59
  days, and they worked really hard.
• 38:02
  They it was like a frat house.
• 38:04
  They played lots of games with each other.
• 38:06
  That, my favorite anecdote of that time was they were always inventing
• 38:11
  something that was silly, right?
• 38:12
  To relieve the pressure of what they had to do.
• 38:14
  And one day they'd invented this little wireless operated tank truck
• 38:20
  that they would send down the hallways having fun to see how far it would go.
• 38:24
  And one day it headed down the hallway and Mike and Jim were at the end of
• 38:28
  a hallway with Mike's office and one side, and Jim's on the other side.
• 38:30
  And it rolled down the hallway and turned towards Jim's office, who they,
• 38:35
  and Jim, they were all afraid of Jim.
• 38:37
  And they went, oh crap, we're gonna, he's gonna go to Jim's office.
• 38:41
  But at the last moment, it turns around it goes to Mike Lazaridis's
• 38:45
  office, which is my way of saying.
• 38:49
  There was a lot of fun in those early days as well, but a healthy
• 38:52
  understanding of never wanting to be on the wrong side of Jim Balsillie.
• 38:57
  And we'll come back to actually how that culture changed as the company, like
• 39:01
  every company as it scales has to grow up at one stage and he brings a new team.
• 39:06
  But I, there was a really interesting piece I thought.
• 39:09
  Which again, a lot of our audience will have experienced where
• 39:14
  the engineers inside a company see the world very differently.
• 39:18
  And they wanted to call this device the pocket link, but the
• 39:23
  branding company wanted to call it something totally different.
• 39:26
  And this is where we end up with it being called a Blackberry.
• 39:29
  I thought it was an interesting out, interesting little anecdote in the story
• 39:34
  because it just shows you how there's a big difference between the marketer, the
• 39:39
  type CEO, like a jobs and the engineer type, like a Wozniak or a Lazaridis.
• 39:47
  Yeah, they, the, there were lots of name suggestions.
• 39:50
  They ultimately went to a marketing firm, I believe in California, which
• 39:56
  gave them a variety of choices.
• 39:58
  And the firm actually came up with the idea of Blackberry Mike and his team.
• 40:06
  We're thinking Pocket link a bunch of nerdy guys.
• 40:09
  It made total sense to them.
• 40:10
  You could link it through your pocket to the, network.
• 40:14
  But Blackberry was like this unique, interesting idea.
• 40:18
  And if you looked at the early keyboard of a Blackberry, it did look like, a bit like
• 40:22
  the buds you might see on a Blackberry.
• 40:25
  Jim and his crew wanted to call it Blade.
• 40:28
  they just they got a lot of testosterone on the sales team
• 40:31
  manly toy instrument for, people.
• 40:36
  And, the marketing guy gave Mike Lazaridis a call and said, tell Jim to look up
• 40:44
  www.blade.com, and that they were all in the same offices at those point.
• 40:51
  all Mike heard after he had sent that email out was a lot of oohs.
• 40:54
  Ooh, that's nasty.
• 40:55
  And in fact, it was a porn site.
• 40:59
  Wouldn't have been great for SEO.
• 41:01
  That didn't work out as a name.
• 41:03
  Brilliant.
• 41:04
  But the real breakthrough then I thought this was really interesting, just the
• 41:08
  psychology of this was that if you thought about who bought phones inside large
• 41:13
  organizations, if not phones, pagers, back then maybe palms, maybe computers, it was
• 41:18
  a CIO and maybe is still the case in many organizations and they'll do a big deal.
• 41:24
  But Blackberry had a very clever idea of getting it in the hands of
• 41:28
  people at the top and make it become top down, pushed by top down senior
• 41:34
  management rather than I.T. And that was a game changer because then it
• 41:38
  just infiltrated the business world.
• 41:41
  Jim had created a team of young, aspiring mostly men salespeople.
• 41:50
  went to conferences, who went to gatherings and showed them what they could
• 41:55
  do while they were away from the office.
• 41:58
  And they particularly targeted salespeople and senior executives.
• 42:03
  And it was like a light went off in their heads because you mean I can
• 42:06
  do my emails from long distance.
• 42:09
  And it, they sold it as they sold it as a status symbol.
• 42:15
  you had a Blackberry, you were a made person.
• 42:18
  I remember as a reporter interviewing people who had early, like CEOs and
• 42:22
  other people who had a Blackberry.
• 42:24
  And while I was interviewing them you could see them on
• 42:28
  the table like, what is that?
• 42:29
  It's a Blackberry.
• 42:30
  And you walk away and you would say why don't I don't have a Blackberry?
• 42:33
  And, that's how they sold it.
• 42:35
  It became a status symbol for the business person.
• 42:38
  And if you didn't have one, your boss was gonna be haranguing you as to why
• 42:42
  you hadn't responded to the email or why you hadn't done what he told you to do.
• 42:46
  And it became a pretty easy sell.
• 42:50
  So at this stage it's an interesting product and as you told me before
• 42:55
  we came on air, then everybody starts to come after you.
• 42:58
  They come after your lunch.
• 42:59
  Loads of players started to try things and it's really interesting
• 43:03
  to see the backstories of these other companies where, for example, Motorola
• 43:07
  had the headstart here, but they had Overinvested in Iridium and had this
• 43:14
  again used up on the company's bandwidth.
• 43:17
  And I, I just find that so interesting that a company can
• 43:20
  invest in an area and just choose the wrong, back, the wrong horse.
• 43:25
  And by backing that wrong horse, you it, you can just use up all your revenue in
• 43:30
  your company versus actually back several horses and hope one might come through.
• 43:34
  But it makes Blackberry at this stage have to run into iterations
• 43:40
  of iterations as it's, as its user base is shooting up and it's barely
• 43:45
  able to keep up with the demand.
• 43:47
  And at this stage we have the comp competitors, but also the company
• 43:51
  has to grow up and they have to in, they have to hire in some new people.
• 43:55
  And those new people weren't very welcome because they were now asking
• 43:58
  these kind of scrappy engineers in the front room to grow up.
• 44:03
  Yeah, it's you've, touched on something I think that is very important.
• 44:08
  It was a very heady time.
• 44:10
  The world was being reinvented and the way we communicated was being reinvented.
• 44:17
  Nobody knew where it was gonna go.
• 44:19
  Nobody knew that Blackberry would be the success that it was, that mobile
• 44:24
  devices was gonna be the big money maker.
• 44:29
  Motorola invested in Iridium the satellite system because it thought, a
• 44:35
  company, it thought it was a brilliant strategy because they weren't gonna
• 44:38
  compete with the handheld devices.
• 44:40
  They were gonna create this network of satellites the planet that people needed
• 44:45
  to communicate, but they were expensive.
• 44:48
  They spent too much money on it, and the demand wasn't there.
• 44:51
  So a lot of people were betting in the wrong places at that time, Rim
• 44:56
  bet in the right place, it sold it to the right audience and it
• 45:00
  had a brilliant networking system.
• 45:03
  Thanks to Mike Lazaridis and a really strong sales team, thanks to Jim.
• 45:08
  It just, it worked out for them and a lot of other people.
• 45:12
  It didn't work out 'cause they picked the wrong place.
• 45:15
  And interestingly, there was an interview with Steve Jobs once and he said Apple,
• 45:20
  at the time he was talking, he said, we're a small company so we have to
• 45:23
  best on technologies that are in their spring that are just about to take off.
• 45:28
  And I thought about that and the time when he wasn't CEO, it was John Scully
• 45:33
  at the time was the time of the Newton.
• 45:35
  And
• 45:36
  Yes.
• 45:37
  they just bet on the technology too early, probably.
• 45:40
  Yeah.
• 45:40
  I just think that's such a piece that people miss with all this is that you,
• 45:45
  there's so much luck with everything and we can be so damning on ourselves
• 45:49
  sometimes that it doesn't work out and you're going there's so many
• 45:52
  pieces of the pie, the sliding doors that need to land for us to do this.
• 45:57
  But a couple of interesting parts of the success story here was you
• 46:02
  were talking about the fact that they didn't even have a proper.
• 46:05
  Billing system to track sales and there was a guy, rims controller, Harvey
• 46:11
  Taylor, he complained to the sales vice President Don McMurtry, that hundreds
• 46:15
  of customers weren't paying monthly service charges and he wasn't prepared
• 46:20
  for McMurtry's response, which was losing a few hundred to get tens of
• 46:24
  thousands of orders is an acceptable cost.
• 46:27
  And then they had to bring in some new blood.
• 46:30
  And this new blood then wanted people to map out product release dates, et
• 46:37
  cetera, et cetera, and it wasn't very welcomed inside the organization.
• 46:41
  It was a very undisciplined company because it was just responding
• 46:46
  to what needed to be done.
• 46:47
  And it needed to be that flexible, it needed to be chaotic because
• 46:52
  they didn't want roles and barriers.
• 46:54
  They wanted to just get out.
• 46:57
  Jim deployed this amazing network of sales staff who were very flexible.
• 47:02
  At one point, the sales staff found themselves in an
• 47:05
  un-air conditioned warehouse.
• 47:07
  I believe it was in New Jersey, where they had to go into all go in.
• 47:14
  And mod modulate the network system because there was a flaw.
• 47:19
  So think about any salesman in a, Fortune 500 company that would do
• 47:23
  something like that, they wouldn't.
• 47:25
  These guys did.
• 47:26
  They all wore multiple hats.
• 47:28
  They were, there was a real comradery, team spirit.
• 47:31
  Do what you have to do to succeed.
• 47:35
  And that worked for a long time until it had to grow up.
• 47:39
  There's a part that here, I just pulled an excerpt from the book.
• 47:42
  You said, Balsillie and , Lazaridis knew they were not well suited to
• 47:46
  running their own service for billing.
• 47:49
  We were just barely holding stuff together, said Sly.
• 47:52
  At the time, rim lacked the staff and experience to manage the billing and
• 47:56
  service needs of a booming customer base.
• 47:58
  But while it made sense to hand backoffice administration over to BellSouth,
• 48:03
  sly wasn't going to yield everything.
• 48:05
  So he fought like crazy to get $10 and BellSouth eventually
• 48:11
  capitulated handing Sly the clout.
• 48:13
  He needed to wrestle similar fees from other carriers.
• 48:17
  Eagle eager to sell Blackberries.
• 48:19
  ARDIS followed, as did Canada's Rogers and Bell, which ran similar data networks.
• 48:25
  This was when things started to just take off, as you said, new
• 48:28
  revenue streams started to come in that they hadn't imagined the.
• 48:32
  Yeah, no, it was, and it was a very few, I don't think they made that exception
• 48:37
  for anyone else but for research in motion, because at that point they
• 48:41
  really needed to have the Blackberry because the demand was so strong.
• 48:45
  And it was Jim, and that was Jim's idea.
• 48:47
  He saw an opportunity to charge and at when at the top of, when it
• 48:55
  peaked, it was hundreds of millions of dollars of extra income for them.
• 49:01
  That was quite extraordinary.
• 49:02
  And most people following the company didn't really understand that.
• 49:07
  this character as well, I think I remember him from the movie, this guy Larry Conlee.
• 49:12
  So he was hired in from Motorola as one of the two new chief operating officers
• 49:18
  to bring order to the chaotic growth.
• 49:20
  And it, was along with this guy Don Morrison.
• 49:23
  And there was good cop, bad cop here.
• 49:26
  And the bad cop again, like I say, was just not welcome because he
• 49:30
  was trying to get people to have discipline about expansion, commit
• 49:35
  the plans, accountability in the organization where there was none.
• 49:39
  Larry Connolly he was a very thoughtful man.
• 49:44
  he was a very large imposing figure physically and he understood that his
• 49:50
  job was to be the enforcer because it was a freewheeling spirited company.
• 49:58
  That was chaotic.
• 49:59
  And if you are having to hire hundreds of people a week, you need systems.
• 50:04
  You, you need discipline.
• 50:07
  Larry was greatly resented by the younger engineers who had
• 50:12
  been there from the beginning.
• 50:13
  And they felt that he was taking away the magic.
• 50:17
  He was taking away the creative spirit, the, made Blackberry possible.
• 50:22
  Larry and Jim understood that company could no longer exist
• 50:27
  if it was gonna survive.
• 50:28
  It was becoming rapidly a big corporation that needed more
• 50:33
  controls, more discipline you can't be hiring dozens of people a week.
• 50:39
  Taking them by bus to a big conference center in Waterloo to to introduce
• 50:45
  'em to people and to give them something to do without having a plan.
• 50:49
  And there was no plan in those days.
• 50:51
  People were just tired and they had to make up what their job was.
• 50:54
  It was crazy.
• 50:56
  So I could understand why the engineers who had been there from
• 51:00
  the beginning greatly disliked Larry, blamed him for destroying the culture.
• 51:06
  But I don't think that's a fair perspective.
• 51:08
  He needed to enforce a new discipline, a new ethos, a new corporate culture.
• 51:15
  And it was hard and it was tough, and he was willing to take the blows.
• 51:18
  And to this day, Jim Balsillie greatly admired what he did and
• 51:24
  was thankful for what he did.
• 51:25
  There's a very good book called From Barbarians to Bureaucrats by a guy called
• 51:30
  Lawrence Miller, and he talks about the lifecycle of an organization that starts
• 51:34
  off like a barbarian type organization, but eventually gets taken over by
• 51:38
  bureaucrats, but not in a negative sense.
• 51:41
  It's like you need them to put manners on the company, but you
• 51:44
  need to keep that kind of barbaric spirit, the entrepreneurial spirit
• 51:48
  inside in, in the organization.
• 51:50
  It, a balancing act.
• 51:52
  And his biggest beef with the company was that they would say, okay, we're
• 51:56
  gonna introduce a new Blackberry next year, but it never came.
• 51:59
  And it might be months late, sometimes a year late.
• 52:03
  And he understood that you couldn't do that.
• 52:05
  You were not gonna survive as an entity if you didn't deliver when you said it.
• 52:10
  So that was the huge challenge that he faced in it, He sped things up.
• 52:15
  They didn't always meet their commitment dates, but he sp sped that
• 52:19
  up and that was important because new entrants were coming in and they were
• 52:23
  gonna be vulnerable if they didn't deliver on what they were promising.
• 52:27
  I'm sure this is something that many VCs who invest in startups experience.
• 52:32
  You said when Conlee requested a report on the company's strategic objectives,
• 52:37
  all he got was a forecast on the next quarter's sales and expenses.
• 52:41
  And he was told there was no P&L projections for the next year.
• 52:45
  No budgets for the company's divisions, and all that was happening
• 52:49
  was Lazaridis and Balsillie.
• 52:51
  He signed off on spending.
• 52:53
  And then you talked about this designer, this radio software designer, Matthias
• 52:58
  Wandell or Vandal inside the organization.
• 53:01
  He vented in his private journal about the meeting where Connolly said, guys, we need
• 53:06
  to put deadlines here that are realistic.
• 53:09
  And he wrote that the whole idea was probably to change RIM'S culture
• 53:13
  to be something more along the line of a stable company like Motorola
• 53:17
  instead of the wild and unstable entrepreneurial company that we were.
• 53:21
  This could alienate people that helped to create the company RIM could
• 53:25
  no longer rely on star performers.
• 53:27
  Instead, the company would rely on procedures and
• 53:30
  policies to get things done.
• 53:31
  Many engineers, Wandel wrote.
• 53:35
  We're asking the same question, how could Mike let him do this?
• 53:39
  So in a way, they saw this as a betrayal that Lazaridis let in this
• 53:43
  guy, and then this guy was stamping on the culture and Mike had his back.
• 53:48
  And this annoyed these original hires inside the company.
• 53:52
  What that, tells you that how little they understood the corporate world.
• 53:58
  These guys were brilliant.
• 54:00
  What they created was amazing.
• 54:02
  It was ridiculous that they had succeeded in doing it, but they
• 54:06
  did, and they never gave up.
• 54:08
  they, and under Mike's guidance, they did amazing things, but the
• 54:13
  company needed more than that.
• 54:15
  And I've heard from a lot of them.
• 54:18
  They blamed Jim, they blamed Conley and the corporate senior people that came in.
• 54:26
  For the loss of the for the failure of the company.
• 54:30
  And that's their perspective.
• 54:32
  They're allowed to have it, but if you stand back and look at
• 54:34
  it, that's not why they failed.
• 54:36
  It didn't fail because they were more organized.
• 54:38
  They were more disciplined and more accountable.
• 54:41
  It failed because they made the wrong bet.
• 54:43
  It just didn't work out for them.
• 54:45
  Eventually, someone smarter came along and made a better version, and that was Apple
• 54:50
  . I have to hold myself back here from going down the rabbit hole
• 54:52
  of so many different directions.
• 54:54
  But eventually we know RIM becomes this massive success.
• 54:58
  Lots of people chasing after it tries to do deals with rim, their new technology,
• 55:03
  they launch Blackberry Connect.
• 55:05
  We're gonna skip all that because one of the things that is often
• 55:08
  missed that happened here was the tragedy of 9/11 and how it changed
• 55:13
  how Blackberry was considered in the States and in particularly by
• 55:18
  Washington because of the encryption.
• 55:20
  And this was a game changer.
• 55:23
  9/11 was a tragedy in so many ways, and the scale of it was beyond the
• 55:30
  capacity for most people to comprehend and the most urgent need in those
• 55:36
  early minutes, hours of the collapse of the World Trade Center was.
• 55:43
  Where are people who survived, who didn't?
• 55:46
  And at and t got overwhelmed, as I understand it.
• 55:49
  They only had one or two base stations in Manhattan, whereas Blackberry had
• 55:55
  several and their network was working in a way that at and t's wasn't.
• 56:00
  And Street was where people use blackberries.
• 56:07
  People relied on them.
• 56:09
  It was the primary business communications tool at that time.
• 56:13
  And it allowed people with people that were still using their blackberries.
• 56:19
  It allowed people who were stranded on planes in airports or
• 56:23
  whatever to communicate to their families when there was so much
• 56:26
  uncertainty who had been affected.
• 56:29
  And it was a very important moment the eye of this horrific event for Blackberry.
• 56:36
  They, called them crypto berries because they were so secure and
• 56:39
  Now the government could use them.
• 56:40
  But then a real moment happened, you mentioned where it was Thanksgiving
• 56:45
  and Oprah has this famous moment where she used to launch her favorite product
• 56:50
  and she gave everyone a Blackberry.
• 56:52
  And again, sales went through the roof in North America.
• 56:56
  Now that was a really seminal moment.
• 56:58
  Oprah she was the, guru of shopping.
• 57:04
  She backed something.
• 57:05
  You were, made, I don't know if you've seen the video.
• 57:08
  The video is extraordinary.
• 57:09
  She just went over the top.
• 57:12
  She just, I love this.
• 57:15
  It's changed my life and the crowd is roaring and she's giving a free
• 57:19
  one to everyone in the audience.
• 57:21
  It was they went to the moon after that.
• 57:24
  I'm gonna top off the rise with this small little paragraph.
• 57:28
  In 14 short years, Lazaridis and Balsillie had steered rim from the obscurity of
• 57:33
  a small Ontario city to claim the title as the New Kings of Technology with an
• 57:38
  inventive smartphone that was a must have status symbol for professionals and rim's.
• 57:43
  Financial condition was catching up with their aspirations.
• 57:46
  By its 2006 fiscal year, the company's revenue exceeded 2 billion,
• 57:51
  a milestone that would be passed.
• 57:53
  With the release of a new Blackberry smartphone, this LTA said was
• 57:59
  a very different Blackberry delivering music and home videos.
• 58:03
  Rim was also talking to customers in a very different way.
• 58:06
  For years, it had relied on carriers to market its own
• 58:09
  products to their customers.
• 58:11
  Now Rim was starting its own branding campaign aimed for
• 58:15
  the first time at Consumers.
• 58:18
  Computer World Communist Mike Elgin declared the slim phone as groundbreaking
• 58:23
  genre killing and trend setting device.
• 58:27
  So it sounds like an iPhone later on, but that.
• 58:30
  was the peak.
• 58:31
  But the fall comes and the fall started really with this patent fight with NTP.
• 58:37
  And let's take it up from there.
• 58:39
  Yeah, it is just this is definitely the sad part of the story because what happens
• 58:45
  is a series of cascading crises, threats that are just hard to imagine, they came
• 58:53
  almost as fast as As Blackberry's success.
• 58:57
  Now the patent dispute goes back to how they, how the network operated.
• 59:05
  Nobody took it seriously.
• 59:08
  And frankly, Blackberry was arrogant about it, which did not play well
• 59:12
  with the court involved, the patent court involved in overseeing this.
• 59:16
  In retrospect we could say they, they should have settled that right away
• 59:20
  for maybe tens of millions of dollars.
• 59:22
  they ended up having to pay a fortune at the end when the judge basically
• 59:26
  said, you're shutting down the network.
• 59:28
  I order you to shut down the network because you are
• 59:30
  not, respecting this court.
• 59:33
  You are not paying what is due to the now deceased creator of this patent.
• 59:39
  So you had that, you had the backdating of stock options scandal.
• 59:45
  It was just one calamity after another.
• 59:47
  And the final blow was when they introduced.
• 59:52
  The phone, the storm, the unfortunately named storm that did not perform,
• 59:58
  did not meet the standards that people had come to expect.
• 1:00:02
  It was basically unusable and most of them were returned, so it was
• 1:00:07
  just devastating one after another.
• 1:00:09
  These events.
• 1:00:11
  One of the things we were saying before we came on air was I was
• 1:00:14
  telling you how I felt some of the practices that Balsillie engaged in.
• 1:00:20
  Like they're very common.
• 1:00:21
  Like it's like that Gordon Gecko greet is good kind of Wall Street
• 1:00:25
  type approach to business that a lot of people were trained in.
• 1:00:28
  And that's how you get ahead and unfortunately seems to work a lot of
• 1:00:32
  narcissists running companies out there.
• 1:00:35
  But he did a few things.
• 1:00:36
  One was, for example, where they launched Blackberry Connect.
• 1:00:41
  They led many carrier many competitors like Nokia, for example, down the
• 1:00:46
  garden path, where they thought they were building a co-product together
• 1:00:50
  and they just wasted two years.
• 1:00:53
  And in one particular case you mentioned in the book, this executive
• 1:00:56
  lost his job because of it, and he knew he, he actually had this
• 1:01:00
  sneaking suspicion that Blackberry were not really playing ball with him.
• 1:01:04
  But the other was the really funny story of the Palm guy
• 1:01:08
  again, and he got his comeuppance,
• 1:01:10
  Yeah.
• 1:01:10
  So Carl Yankowski who was the CEO of Palm I think really wanted to buy them out.
• 1:01:18
  He realized he couldn't, and then he wanted to understand their technology.
• 1:01:21
  They wanted to know what carrier network that they would be using,
• 1:01:25
  Mike and Jim just wanted to.
• 1:01:28
  Confuse misdirect him, get rid of him because they didn't
• 1:01:32
  want to do any deals with him.
• 1:01:34
  And they actually created a phone that showed who the carrier was on the, I
• 1:01:40
  think it was on the left hand side.
• 1:01:41
  You could tell who the signal was from.
• 1:01:44
  And they showed him the phone.
• 1:01:46
  And they had created this they had put the imprint of this carrier on
• 1:01:51
  that wasn't actually the carrier that they were going to use.
• 1:01:54
  And they said we can't tell you, but we can show you the phone.
• 1:01:57
  And Yankowski , according to Jim Balsillie saw the carrier's name on this
• 1:02:03
  fake phone and started pursuing them.
• 1:02:06
  But it didn't work out.
• 1:02:07
  But it just, it was, this is what they felt they had to do to deceive, to ward
• 1:02:14
  off, to stay above water with so many people trying to come at them, to buy
• 1:02:18
  them, to outcompete them, to destroy them.
• 1:02:21
  It was we can look at it and say, oh, that's unethical.
• 1:02:24
  Or we can look at it and say that's how they survived.
• 1:02:27
  Exactly, and unfortunately it came back to roost in, in some ways with the amount
• 1:02:32
  of energy that it drained for them.
• 1:02:35
  There's a, you mentioned this in the book as well, art and the Art of War.
• 1:02:40
  Sun Tzu talks about this moment of being and the ground, the death ground
• 1:02:44
  where things are really, bad and falsely actually admitted that's how he felt
• 1:02:48
  going through the courts at the time, particularly about the patent courts.
• 1:02:53
  And then later on about the securities, where they were
• 1:02:55
  backdating, stock valuations.
• 1:02:58
  And maybe we'll say a bit about that because there was a huge mental toll
• 1:03:01
  and I was saying to you before we came on air, when you see somebody
• 1:03:04
  at the top of an organization.
• 1:03:06
  Who has worked so hard to get there, apart from the amount of personal energy that
• 1:03:11
  goes into that, the amount of sacrifice.
• 1:03:13
  At one stage, you were saying there was a couple of RIM engineers, including
• 1:03:18
  Lazaridis working on Christmas day and Lazaridis went up and got them a
• 1:03:21
  takeaway from a burger joint, and that just shows you the amount of effort
• 1:03:26
  people put in to earn these big dollars.
• 1:03:29
  But there's a massive, cost to that.
• 1:03:31
  I think the most, significant factor at this point as the competition is rising
• 1:03:37
  is the pressures of growth are becoming overwhelming and the number of predators
• 1:03:44
  that are out there trying to buy, steal, undermine over Outcompete putting enormous
• 1:03:51
  pressure on the company and it was putting a lot of pressure this remarkable
• 1:03:55
  partnership between Jim and Mike.
• 1:03:57
  Two very different people, the shark and the innovator who
• 1:04:01
  had worked so well together.
• 1:04:03
  But separately there was Jim's world and one of the elements
• 1:04:07
  of the Blackberry story is that there was no big head office.
• 1:04:11
  There were multiple buildings throughout Kitchener Waterloo,
• 1:04:13
  where their company was based.
• 1:04:16
  So you could go.
• 1:04:18
  For weeks without seeing each other because they had their own teams.
• 1:04:22
  And it worked really well until things started to go really, wrong.
• 1:04:27
  And the first one was the patent fight.
• 1:04:30
  Mike took that on because he was the guy that understood patents.
• 1:04:33
  He was the guy that understood technology.
• 1:04:35
  He could articulate, why they hadn't stolen this patent.
• 1:04:41
  But, Mike is a fragile person in the limelight.
• 1:04:45
  And when he's under fire in an area he doesn't understand, such as law, patent
• 1:04:50
  law, who does understand patent law, it's a very narrow talent area of skill.
• 1:04:56
  And Mike wasn't up to it.
• 1:04:58
  And Mike actually came home.
• 1:05:00
  He couldn't keep going.
• 1:05:02
  And he he suffered enormously as a result of that.
• 1:05:06
  Because he was not able to explain it in a way that the court was understanding.
• 1:05:11
  He had difficulty responding to the aggressive questions by the other side.
• 1:05:16
  And so he asked Jim to step in and Jim took the bullet and became
• 1:05:23
  the public face of this crisis.
• 1:05:26
  And a lot of people were saying, just settle.
• 1:05:28
  Just settle.
• 1:05:29
  But it was very difficult and it was a crisis.
• 1:05:32
  It ended up being a crisis for Jim.
• 1:05:34
  He ended up a hotel room having close to a breakdown very difficult time.
• 1:05:41
  And Jim told us all about this.
• 1:05:43
  He was comfortable talking about that crisis and how he had lost confidence
• 1:05:48
  in himself, confidence confidence in his ability to save this company
• 1:05:52
  because of the enormous threat.
• 1:05:55
  That they were facing.
• 1:05:56
  It reached the point where the judge said, you guys, I'm shutting you guys down
• 1:05:59
  basically unless you reach a settlement.
• 1:06:02
  And he didn't know which way to turn.
• 1:06:03
  And he ended up bringing in this guru who helped bring him back to
• 1:06:07
  a place where he had confidence in himself and the ability to go forward.
• 1:06:12
  and I don't think Jim ever forgave Mike for that, that
• 1:06:17
  he was put in that position.
• 1:06:19
  And their other big crisis was the backdating of stock, options, which was
• 1:06:26
  a practice in Silicon Valley where they would lower the price of the options
• 1:06:31
  that they'd given you so that you could profit more when you were in a position
• 1:06:35
  to sell those options on the stocks.
• 1:06:38
  And Mike felt that Jim had betrayed him by allowing this to happen.
• 1:06:43
  Jim felt this was the only way.
• 1:06:46
  I was able to attract talent from Silicon Valley, from the United States that
• 1:06:50
  we needed to keep the company going.
• 1:06:53
  And these, these controversies to the outside just looked like bad decisions.
• 1:07:00
  What we didn't understand until it was all over is that this drove enormous
• 1:07:05
  wedges between the two leaders.
• 1:07:07
  They no longer spoke to each other.
• 1:07:09
  A very difficult time for the company.
• 1:07:11
  And it trickled down and things started to weaken direction became
• 1:07:17
  more feeble, and it became a very difficult time for the company
• 1:07:23
  . That's what's so interesting and so important I think, to share is
• 1:07:26
  those things that actually happen, like we're all human here, these are
• 1:07:31
  humans and those decisions are made.
• 1:07:33
  'cause we, when we tend to talk about these stories, you see them as, oh, the
• 1:07:37
  idiots, or they deserve this, or whatever.
• 1:07:39
  And you're going, no one deserves that.
• 1:07:41
  And I think that you do a great job of telling those stories and
• 1:07:44
  also with the access that you had.
• 1:07:47
  But I just wanted to mention about the iPhone piece because
• 1:07:50
  they did know it's different.
• 1:07:52
  And you call this out in the book that of course when we read these
• 1:07:56
  headlines that you're dismissive of this new technology that you can
• 1:08:01
  actually see it as, oh, they're idiots.
• 1:08:03
  They didn't see It coming.
• 1:08:04
  But of course they did.
• 1:08:06
  And you mentioned this moment where Steve Jobs steps on the
• 1:08:09
  stage announced that the iPhone.
• 1:08:11
  Mike was actually on a treadmill at home watching it, and the next day
• 1:08:15
  he pulls Jim into his office and Jim says, it's okay, we'll be fine.
• 1:08:18
  And Mike says no, this is, different.
• 1:08:20
  These guys are really good.
• 1:08:22
  and, then rim's chiefs didn't give much additional thought to Apple for
• 1:08:27
  months because for example, some of the comments you say, Larry Conlee,
• 1:08:31
  who we mentioned earlier on, he said it wasn't a threat to our core business.
• 1:08:36
  It wasn't secure.
• 1:08:38
  It had rapid battery drain and a lousy digital keyboard.
• 1:08:41
  If the iPhone gained traction, rim, senior executives believed it would
• 1:08:45
  be with consumers who cared more about YouTube and other inter net
• 1:08:48
  escapes than efficiency and security.
• 1:08:52
  And one of the reasons I call that out is, I'm sure you've seen this time and
• 1:08:54
  time again, is that's what you would say.
• 1:08:58
  Because you're so busy and this is where you call it, they were
• 1:09:00
  so busy with so many deals.
• 1:09:03
  They were hiring people that are at such a rate that they
• 1:09:06
  could barely keep up with it.
• 1:09:07
  They were selling at such a rate they could barely keep with it.
• 1:09:10
  That when a threat like this raises its head, you go, Ooh that's dangerous,
• 1:09:15
  but we have to deliver all this stuff.
• 1:09:17
  And that challenge inside any organization is so deep.
• 1:09:22
  It is and you have highlighted all of the key moments in Rim when they watched Steve
• 1:09:29
  Jobs walk on stage and said quoting wayne Gretzky, famous Canadian hockey player.
• 1:09:36
  I skate to where the puck is going.
• 1:09:38
  It's a very shrewd remark and use of a quote by Steve Jobs 'cause he knew
• 1:09:44
  that this is where the world was going.
• 1:09:46
  I understand why Mike would've said this is an impossibility.
• 1:09:50
  He's looking at this conference, the video of this conference in
• 1:09:54
  San Francisco, and they're talking about maps and movies and photos.
• 1:10:00
  All of the things that they couldn't do at Blackberry because the carriers
• 1:10:04
  wouldn't let them because they didn't want load on the network.
• 1:10:08
  That kind of data the most networks were not, built to carry that.
• 1:10:15
  They did not have the capacity.
• 1:10:17
  But the most important announcement that Steve Jobs made that day was
• 1:10:20
  not the phone, was his deal, which Cingular, which would become part of
• 1:10:26
  at and t, and they were going to invest billions of dollars in a new network.
• 1:10:31
  The big enemy within Blackberry was the carriers because they wouldn't let
• 1:10:36
  them even add more customers because of, they were concerned about the,
• 1:10:41
  networks crashing as a result of it.
• 1:10:43
  So their battle always was with the networks.
• 1:10:46
  And Jobs brilliantly saw that if he could get an ally that was gonna invest
• 1:10:53
  an enormous amount of money in more capacity, he could make this work.
• 1:10:57
  And if you had an early Blackberry in those days, in New York
• 1:11:00
  in particular, your phone was dropping stuff all the time.
• 1:11:04
  You were cut off all the time, but after a year, they got it sorted.
• 1:11:09
  So we're landing the ship here with the fall, but later on there's
• 1:11:13
  a chapter called Goat Rodeo.
• 1:11:15
  This is where QNX becomes part of the plan to rebuild the future, even as
• 1:11:20
  the present keeps deteriorating, as you said, and we're skipping a couple of
• 1:11:24
  chapters here, the relationship with the carriers became more and more challenged.
• 1:11:28
  They released the storm phone that you mentioned earlier on.
• 1:11:30
  It wasn't very good.
• 1:11:32
  They'd fast tracked it.
• 1:11:33
  They knew there was lots of problems with it.
• 1:11:35
  We talked about Apple's problem with autocorrect.
• 1:11:39
  The, storm was terrible.
• 1:11:40
  It didn't even click.
• 1:11:41
  Stephen Fry, the comedian and actor and writer absolutely slams it on Twitter.
• 1:11:48
  So things were going really bad, and then this QNX part becomes a
• 1:11:52
  plan to get us out of all of this.
• 1:11:55
  Well, QNX is interesting because they were at the time based, I think in Ottawa,
• 1:12:00
  Ontario, absolutely brilliant technology.
• 1:12:03
  And in fact, QNX now is the guts of what the new Blackberry is.
• 1:12:10
  Their systems are being used, their technology, which is obviously advanced
• 1:12:13
  since they acquired it, is being used for the operating systems that they're
• 1:12:17
  selling to cars, to the automakers because it's a it was a really good
• 1:12:22
  technology, but it didn't quite fit with what they wanted to do with the phone.
• 1:12:27
  So Mike saw the future and saw how brilliant these guys were,
• 1:12:32
  but they couldn't integrate it.
• 1:12:35
  Right away with the phone to to give it an edge against Apple.
• 1:12:41
  And that didn't work.
• 1:12:42
  But the asset in the long run was a great asset to have purchased.
• 1:12:47
  Again, pieces are falling away here as they're going on, and now they're
• 1:12:51
  leaning on their security aspect of it.
• 1:12:53
  This is, as Arab Spring unfolds and their encrypted messaging becomes
• 1:12:58
  really important and is, there's a whole geopolitical pressure
• 1:13:01
  on the company at this stage.
• 1:13:03
  Now everyone wants them to give them access in the Arab Spring, they
• 1:13:09
  wanted to have the network opened.
• 1:13:10
  It was it it's trickle effect of one crisis after another.
• 1:13:17
  it, that, that became overwhelming.
• 1:13:19
  All, of, these crises were very serious and very devastating.
• 1:13:27
  And I do believe that the company have done a better job
• 1:13:31
  of navigating, could have done a better job inventing, but there was
• 1:13:37
  something that they couldn't fix.
• 1:13:39
  And that was the breakdown between Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie.
• 1:13:43
  Was over stock options.
• 1:13:45
  It was over the patent lawsuit.
• 1:13:48
  faith in each other.
• 1:13:50
  They didn't trust each other they felt betrayed.
• 1:13:54
  And it's, that to me is the essential tragedy of the Blackberry story.
• 1:13:59
  These two very different people completely whether in personalities or talent levels
• 1:14:07
  made that work for them to create, to sell, to grow Blackberry is what made
• 1:14:14
  them weak when things started to go bad.
• 1:14:17
  And another element is the board of directors.
• 1:14:20
  We're talking about two co CEOs that didn't even speak to each other.
• 1:14:24
  You run a company like that?
• 1:14:25
  And where was the board?
• 1:14:26
  Why were they not, more aggressive about the leadership?
• 1:14:33
  did they should they have hired another CEO?
• 1:14:35
  Would that have solved it?
• 1:14:36
  Not necessarily.
• 1:14:38
  But so when you come under those kind of pressures your weaknesses become much
• 1:14:45
  more important and much more devastating.
• 1:14:48
  And, in fairness to the board, as you call out in the book, they were the ones, the
• 1:14:51
  board director was the one who called out the audit into the, stock options as well.
• 1:14:56
  But eventually because of increasing pressure, they break up this co CEO
• 1:15:02
  era and the company's reinvented.
• 1:15:05
  Maybe we'll just say where, what happened at the very end.
• 1:15:08
  And then where the company are now, because you do hint to a comeback at
• 1:15:13
  the end of the book in the epilogue.
• 1:15:15
  Jim was the first to leave.
• 1:15:17
  He was done when the board, decided to, I think initially back
• 1:15:23
  Mike, and then ultimately one of Mike's lieutenants to be the CEO.
• 1:15:27
  And he didn't last very long.
• 1:15:30
  They both became increasingly disenchanted with the company.
• 1:15:34
  The saddest moment I felt was when Mike left he felt that the new CEO was taking
• 1:15:42
  the company in direction that was wrong.
• 1:15:44
  It was time for him to leave.
• 1:15:46
  Mike Lazaridis left his job, left his office with his box of belongings.
• 1:15:51
  He drove to a local store and bought all the blackberries that they had
• 1:15:57
  to sell, he put them in his box.
• 1:16:00
  And he said that he was afraid that there would never be any more blackberries
• 1:16:04
  and he was gonna get as many as he could because he felt it was over.
• 1:16:08
  Ultimately he was right.
• 1:16:09
  It happened a lot more slower than he thought it would, but to me it
• 1:16:12
  was of the most poignant moments in their story that he did that.
• 1:16:17
  And finally, Jackie, you mentioned about the staging for a comeback.
• 1:16:22
  And we see blackberry rim are back.
• 1:16:26
  They're back in the game at the moment as well.
• 1:16:28
  But where was that for you when you wrote the book?
• 1:16:31
  Reminding our audience it was 10 years ago.
• 1:16:33
  So where were, things then?
• 1:16:36
  And then you can just look at the internet if you wanna know where they are now.
• 1:16:40
  I think 10 years ago Blackberry still thought it had a chance.
• 1:16:42
  It had a big investor had very contrary investor that bought them
• 1:16:47
  when things were really bad they hired in a new CEO, John Chen who reduced
• 1:16:54
  the size of the company and turned its focus to the QNX technology.
• 1:17:00
  He saw great opportunity there and the opportunity ultimately
• 1:17:04
  became computing within cars.
• 1:17:07
  He could see where the world was going.
• 1:17:10
  You could see where automakers were going.
• 1:17:13
  We see it in Tesla today.
• 1:17:14
  They're operating internal operating systems and so they they are still a
• 1:17:19
  small company, but they're growing and they're profitable and they're very much
• 1:17:24
  invested in selling operating systems to automakers all over the world.
• 1:17:30
  Now in in, in, it, they're creating and operating sort of a computer
• 1:17:36
  within the car that controls everything from music to other electronic parts.
• 1:17:41
  And, it's still a small company.
• 1:17:44
  I don't know how much bigger it can get.
• 1:17:46
  You do think that over time.
• 1:17:48
  A much bigger player will want to come in and have either that
• 1:17:51
  technology or their customer base.
• 1:17:54
  There's always assets in the ashes.
• 1:17:57
  And it's a as we said before, and I loved, by the way, I was saying to Jackie,
• 1:18:03
  what you did on the cover is beautiful.
• 1:18:05
  There's a, it's a blackberry for those just listening to us.
• 1:18:08
  And it's like the death mask the skull mask that you see in
• 1:18:13
  the celebrations of the death.
• 1:18:17
  It's a sad story and it's it also shows you where you can come from
• 1:18:21
  with unbelievable drive and the willingness and hard work as well.
• 1:18:26
  But it's a. Brilliant piece of work and a brilliant movie as well.
• 1:18:30
  Really enjoyed the movie as well, and Jackie very grateful
• 1:18:33
  for you for joining us.
• 1:18:35
  And thank you very much.
• 1:18:36
  You've brought back a lot of memories.
• 1:18:37
  This was a while ago.
• 1:18:39
  Blackberry's still alive.
• 1:18:40
  It's still operating.
• 1:18:42
  and Jim are in very comfortable position.
• 1:18:45
  They moved on and done other things.
• 1:18:48
  And Blackberry it's a seminal moment in the history that we were all part of.
• 1:18:52
  And you've done a brilliant job.
• 1:18:54
  Really enjoyed it.
• 1:18:55
  Along with your co-author, Sean Silcoff, author of.
• 1:18:58
  Losing the Signal, the Untold Story Behind The Extraordinary Rise and
• 1:19:01
  Spectacular Fall of Blackberry.
• 1:19:04
  Jacquie McNish Thank you for joining us.
• 1:19:06
  Thank you for having me.
• 1:19:07
  Thanks again to Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute.
• 1:19:10
  Kyndryl runs and reimagines the technology systems that drive advantage
• 1:19:14
  for the world's leading businesses.
• 1:19:16
  With a unique blend of AI powered consulting, built on unmatched managed
• 1:19:20
  service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness the power of technology for
• 1:19:24
  smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge.
• 1:19:28
  You can find Ry.
• 1:19:30
  The Kyndryl Institute that features many of the guests and authors we've
• 1:19:34
  had on the show from Paul Sangeet Choudary to Rita McGrath to Nadya
• 1:19:40
  Zhexembayeva, and many, many more.
• 1:19:43
  At Kyndryl.com/institute.