Losing The Signal: The Spectacular Rise And Fall Of The Blackberr

Winner of the National Business Book Award and #1 National Bestseller

Losing the Signal is the riveting untold story of how BlackBerry engineered one of the most spectacular technological upsets of the twenty-first century before it lost its way in the fog of smartphone wars, management indecision, and the breakdown of one of the most successful partnerships in the history of Canadian business. Its rise and fall is a cautionary tale of the unrelenting speed of modern success and failure.

At the heart of the story are two mismatched co-CEOs—Mike Lazaridis, a bookish innovator, and Jim Balsillie, an aggressive entrepreneur—who grew their company from humble beginnings above a bagel store in Waterloo, Ontario. Harnessing innovation and sharp-elbowed tactics, BlackBerry’s bosses outsmarted powerful international competitors and built a global business in a little more than a decade with an addictive phone that changed the way we communicated. BlackBerry’s devices were so ubiquitous that even President Barack Obama favoured them above all others. Just as BlackBerry was emerging as the dominant global player, internal fault lines hobbled the company at the very moment its smartphone crown was challenged by stronger competitors: Apple, Google and Samsung. When the Canadian company finally made its move, it stumbled with delayed, poorly designed and unpopular handheld devices that took it out of the race. Only fifteen years after the BlackBerry was launched, the company is struggling to survive. Its share of the U.S. phone market fell from fifty per cent in 2009 to less than one percent by the end of 2014.

Written by veteran journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, Losing the Signal is an enduring study of a technology that defined a generation, in a ferocious industry that leaves little margin for error.