The Innovation Show The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry with Jacquie McNish
Feb 23, 2026
Jacquie McNish, investigative business journalist and co-author of Losing the Signal, traces BlackBerry’s dramatic arc. She highlights the founders’ clash and leadership styles. She recounts the 2011 global outage, the NTP patent war, the failed Storm launch, and the QNX pivot. She explores encrypted messaging’s geopolitical role and the company’s reinvention for automotive systems.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
The Dubai Outage That Exposed RIM's Single Network Risk
- Jim Balsillie discovered a global BlackBerry outage mid-conference when his device showed no network and he learned RIM's private servers had failed.
- A Slough server and its backup misrouted traffic, blowing out RIM's worldwide encrypted messaging network for days and causing intense user withdrawal.
The Odd Couple Founders From Waterloo
- Mike Lazaridis was the tinkering inventor type who built radio and modem prototypes from childhood and ran a ragged lab above a bagel shop in Waterloo.
- Jim Balsillie was the scrappy, ambitious Harvard MBA who mortgaged his house to keep RIM afloat and acted as the business 'shark' Lazaridis needed.
Designing For Network Limits Created BlackBerry's Edge
- Lazaridis' 'less is more' design embraced network limits by pushing minimal headers first and requesting full messages on demand.
- That thumb-keyboard plus conservative data model let BlackBerry work reliably on early narrow Mobitex networks, creating enterprise trust through encrypted, efficient delivery.
