Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Blackberry

It was a classic modern business story: two Canadian entrepreneurs build an iconic brand that would forever change the way we communicate. From its humble beginnings in an office above a bagel store in Waterloo, Ontario, BlackBerry outsmarted the global giants with an addictive smartphone that generated billions of dollars. Its devices were so ubiquitous that even President Barack Obama favoured them above all others. But just as it was emerging as the dominant global player, BlackBerry took a dramatic turn.

Losing the Signal is the riveting, never-before-told story of one of the most spectacular technological upsets of the 21st century. Unlike Enron, which was undone by its executives' illegal activities, or Lehman Brothers, which collapsed as part of a larger global banking crisis, BlackBerry's rise and fall is a modern-day tale of the unrelenting speed of success and failure. It is a thrilling account of how two mismatched CEOs outsmarted more-powerful competitors with a combination of innovation and sharp-elbowed tactics; and how, once on top of the world, they lost their way. The company responded too slowly to competitors' innovations, and when it finally made its move, it stumbled with delayed, poorly designed and unpopular smartphones. A little more than a decade after Research In Motion introduced the BlackBerry, it is now struggling to survive. Its share of the US phone market fell from 50 per cent in 2009 to about one percent in 2013, showing just how aggressive, fast and unforgiving today's global business market can be.

JACQUIE MCNISH is a senior writer with The Globe and Mail and previously The Wall Street Journal. She has won seven National Newspaper Awards for her groundbreaking investigations into some of the biggest business stories of the past three decades. She is a regular host on BNN and an adjunct professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. She has authored three bestselling books: The Big Score: Robert Friedland, Inco, and the Voisey’s Bay Hustle; Wrong Way: The Fall of Conrad Black (winner of the 2005 National Business Book Award), with Sinclair Stewart; and The Third Rail: Confronting Our Pension Failures (winner of the 2014 National Business Book Award), co-authored by Jim Leech. In his 2005 New York Times review of Wrong Way, author Bryan Burrough praised her as “long one of Canada’s best business writers.” She lives in Toronto with her husband and two sons.

SEAN SILCOFF is a business writer with The Globe and Mail and previously the National Post and Canadian Business magazine. He led the Globe’s coverage of the rise and fall of BlackBerry and has written extensively on many major Canadian business stories of the past two decades, including the takeover battle for telecom giant BCE, the contentious merger between brewers Molson and Coors, and the near-death struggles of manufacturing giant Bombardier Inc. He also oversaw the 1999 launch of the first Rich 100, Canadian Business’s annual list of the country’s wealthiest people. Sean has won two National Newspaper Awards, an Aerospace Journalist of the Year Award and the Edward Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists. He lives in the Gatineau Hills, near Ottawa, with his wife and three children.