Business Wars

It’s September 11, 2001, and the only network running in downtown NYC is the one owned and operated by BlackBerry’s manufacturer, Reserach in Motion. On one of the most devastating days in American history, that unique reliability wins RIM new fans from Wall Street to Capitol Hill. Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, the co-CEOs of RIM, created the first mobile devices that synced work email accounts to mobile. But when Steve Jobs picks up the bulky Blackberry, he sees an opportunity — and a rivalry is born.

It’s late 2005, and Steve Jobs is deciding between two prototypes for an Apple phone. His choice will go on to become perhaps the best-selling product ever. Now his team just has to make the touchscreen technology work. Thousands of miles away in Waterloo, Canada, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis can barely keep up with orders for BlackBerrys. But a scandal at the company blackens their reputation, and plants a seed of disaster between the two co-CEOs.

It’s summer 2008, and Research In Motion’s Mike Lazaridis is at the product testing site for BlackBerry’s new device: a touchscreen designed to compete with the iPhone. This model, however, is going to leave more than broken glass in its wake, when it threatens to sever RIM’s relationship with Verizon. But while RIM is working to match the last iteration of the iPhone, Apple is about to open up a new battlefront. One that RIM has not even dreamed of.

It’s January 2011 and Research in Motion’s Jim Balsillie is in Davos, Switzerland when he discovers that his company is being threatened by the Egyptian government. BlackBerry’s BBM messaging system is a lifeline for protestors in the country. Balsillie starts to think that BBM could hold the key to RIM’s survival — even as its sales disintegrate. Apple, meanwhile, isn’t resting on its laurels. Steve Jobs innovates with a tablet that further buries RIM, as it steals one of RIM’s closest business partners.

It’s a GPS! It’s a camera! It’s a computer! It’s...your smartphone. And in 2021, it feels like you can’t live without it. But when Blackberry and iPhone got into the game in the mid-2000s, that wasn’t yet the case. In just 15 years, our technology has changed dramatically — and so has the culture around it. To help us make sense of it all is Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief at The Verge and host of the Decoder podcast. We’re looking at how the iPhone vs. Blackberry rivalry ushered in a new era of tech habits and where these smartphones have left to go.