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BlackBerry Town: How high tech success has played out for Canada's Kitchener-Waterloo
The smartphone was an incredibly successful Canadian invention created by a team of engineers and marketers led by Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. But there was a third key player involved ― the community of Kitchener-Waterloo. In this book Chuck Howitt offers a new history of BlackBerry which documents how the resources and the people of Kitchener-Waterloo supported, facilitated, benefited from and celebrated the achievement that BlackBerry represents. After its few short years of explosive growth and pre-eminence, BlackBerry lost its market to digital juggernauts Apple, Samsung and Huawei. No surprises there. Like Nokia and Motorola before it, BlackBerry was eclipsed. Shareholders lost billions. Thousands of employees lost jobs. Bankruptcy was avoided but the company's founding geniuses were gone, leaving an operation that today is only a fragment of what had been. For Kitchener-Waterloo ― as Chuck Howitt tells the story ― the Blackberry experience is a mixed bag of disappointments and major ongoing benefits. The wealth it generated for its founders produced two very important university research institutes. Many recent digital startups have taken advantage of the city's pool of talented and experienced tech workers and ambitious, well-educated university grads. A strong digital and tech industry thrives today in Kitchener-Waterloo ― in a way a legacy of the BlackBerry experience. Across Canada, communities hope for homegrown business successes like BlackBerry. This book underlines how a mid-sized, strong community can help grow a world-beating company, and demonstrates the importance of the attitudes and decisions of local institutions in enabling and sustaining successful innovation. Canada has a lot to learn from BlackBerry Town.
- GenresHistory
264 pages, Paperback
Published September 3, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
October 28, 2019
Bought Chuck's book because I knew him from previous job. Wasn't expecting to get much out of it, because I figured it would be all technical. Starting reading it and was quite pleased to find that it was quite interesting and informative. Opened my eyes to things that happened in my hometown.
July 7, 2020
In this compelling book, author, freelance writer, and retired journalist at Waterloo Region Record, Chuck Howitt chronicles how a powerful amalgam of academics, altruism and acuity can spawn an arresting ecosystem that fosters a virtuous cycle. “Blackberry Town” is a homage to the zeal and vision of one man that transformed an ordinary and uneventful region into a teeming microcosm of technology and entrepreneurial bent. As readers would have easily guessed from one look at the title, the man is question is none other than Mike Lazaridis, the former founder and brain behind the company formerly known as Research In Motion (RIM), and famous for the manufacture of the once eponymous and ubiquitous mobile phone, Blackberry.
While the primary focus of Mr. Howitt’s book revolves around Laziridis and the Blackberry, the quintessential theme animating his work is a seamless public-private partnership that worked overtime to put a region at the forefront of the global telecommunications and information technology map. Mr. Howitt’s fascinating story incubates (no pun intended) within the much-vaunted portals of the University of Waterloo (UW). A pesky, innately curious and zestful undergraduate takes it upon himself to seize most of an engineering Professor’s in-class and post-class time peppering the latter with questions on wireless communications. Laziridis the student and Professor Mohamed Elmasry were both acutely aware of the fact that the subject of wireless communications was not even part of the curriculum! This enthusiasm transformed into a full-fledged obsession when Lazaridis and nine other students piled into a van and drove all the way to Ottawa one weekend to listen to David Bohm, a legend among physicists, who had worked with Albert Einstein at Princeton University and was considered one of the most significant theorists in the field during the twentieth century.
The University of Waterloo turned out to be the perfect laboratory to fuel the aspirations of a young Laziridis. Boasting a phalanx of legendary computer engineers and physicists, by 1980, only two decades and a bit after its first intake of students, Waterloo had become a computer science “juggernaut in Canada and the world.” This stellar repute was the tireless efforts of the indefatigable James Wesley “Wes” Graham, popularly known as the “father of computing at UW. However, as Mr. Howitt illustrates, Graham was not the only superstar making the rounds at UW. The unassuming William Tutte with a PhD from Cambridge University immigrated to Canada in 1948 to accept a teaching position at the University. Recruited to UW by Ralph Stanton, head of math and the same unsung hero who brought Graham to the university, Tutte was a world-renowned expert in combinatorics, an obscure but important branch of math dealing with subjects such as optimization, graph theory and cryptography. “But Tutte was hiding a much greater secret than any of the calculations underlying his math theorems. During the Second World War, he had worked at the legendary British code-breaking office at Bletchley Park. Tutte and his team cracked the code behind one of the most important wireless machines used by the Germans to send top-secret messages. And they did it without having a working prototype of the device, known as the Lorenz machine. Unlike his more famous colleague Alan Turing, who used a prototype passed on by the Poles to crack the codes behind the Enigma machine, Tutte and his crew had only intercepted messages to work with. Sifting through those messages over four grueling months, Tutte slowly pieced together how the Lorenz machine was structured, then created an algorithm used to build an electronic computer called the Colossus. The computer, among the first in the world, was used to break Nazi codes for the rest of the war. Tutte and crew’s breakthrough was described as “the greatest intellectual feat” of the Second World War, but in a cruel twist of fate, no one heard about their heroics. After the war, the British government destroyed or classified all records from Bletchley Park and forbade any of its employees to share their secrets.”
It was no surprise then that the mercurial Laziridis was all worked up with inspiration with such a hallowed group surrounding him. Post tinkering with cathode ray tubes and computers to come up with a system to display text on a TV screen, Laziridis was convinced that it would be a cool way for companies to advertise their products. Summoning his childhood buddy Doug Fregin from Windsor, the pair launched their new enterprise in the spring of 1984. “Searching for a name for their startup, Lazaridis was idly watching TV one day when he saw a story about football players trying to improve their balance by taking ballet lessons. Printed across the bottom of the screen were the words “poetry in motion.” He had an epiphany and the name Research In Motion was born.”
A lucrative contract with Sutherland-Schultz, in addition to bolstering the revenues for RIM also brought into its fold an aggressive, ebullient man who along with Laziridis would shape the future contours of RIM – Jim Balsillie. “In 1992, Sutherland-Schultz was being sold and the new owners made it clear there would be no place for Balsillie. At this point, the ambitious Harvard grad was tired of playing second banana. He wanted to run his own operation and had a severance deal from Sutherland Schultz to help make it happen. It wasn’t quite big enough to purchase all of RIM, but Balsillie at least wanted a majority stake in the company. Lazaridis wasn’t willing to give up control of his baby but by this point had decided he couldn’t live without Balsillie on his team.”
The duo got to work on making RIM a force to reckon with. The start though was more than just a bit tepid. The Inter@ctive Pager introduced in the fall of 1996 received mixed reviews. “Corporate User magazine called it the top wireless product of the year, but Wireless Internet and Mobile Computer Newsletter, a widely respected publication, was not impressed. The pager is a good one, but “it’s a bit too heavy, bulky and expensive ($675 per unit) to attract many mobile professionals,” said Allan A. Reiter.” However, history would be made with the next product offering, the 950. However, Laziridis and Balsillie almost missed their date with destiny by a whisker. As Mr. Howitt illustrates, “although prototypes of the 950 weren’t ready, Lazaridis planned to use two industrial-foam mockups of the device as part of his presentation. But when he and Balsillie arrived for the crucial meeting, they realized that the mockups had been left in the taxi they had taken from the airport. Awkward moments ensued while the embarrassed RIM founder asked that someone call the cab company to retrieve the precious Leapfrogs. In the meantime, he stalled for time by laying out the business plan for the mobile email market and the fact BellSouth had first-mover advantage over its competitors. He described what the 950 would look like and how it would work. Thirty anxious minutes crawled by. The BellSouth executives seemed bored and unconvinced. All seemed lost when a BellSouth employee suddenly walked in with the missing mockups. Their arrival seemed to jolt everyone awake. As Lazaridis extolled the powers of the device, BellSouth executives passed them around. With tangible evidence of the 950 now in their hands, something they could feel and touch and look at, skepticism in the room gradually melted. Lazaridis’s confidence was infectious. The telecom bosses were enthralled. Lazaridis “had those guys thinking he would walk on water,” said Jim Hobbs, vice-president of BellSouth’s mobile data group.” Three cheers to the Atlanta taxi driver!
There was no looking back. In early 1999 RIM announced a new name for its sizzling wireless device. The BlackBerry. The name had come from a California firm specializing in corporate branding. “RIM evangelists, as salespeople came to be known, whipped out their BlackBerrys in airports and trade shows. Curious onlookers were soon enthralled by a device that could send and receive messages of up to 2,600 words in seconds instead of minutes, all on a battery that lasted up to three weeks. The BlackBerry was truly a data powerhouse.” This jump start of RIM kick started an economic boom in the hitherto quiet and calm region of Kitchener-Waterloo. With a workforce of more than 900, a market cap of $9.5 billion, double-digit revenue increases each quarter and ownership of seven buildings locally, RIM was on the road to becoming the most successful company ever to emerge from Kitchener-Waterloo. The real estate market attained stratospheric heights as at one point in time, RIM occupied more than twenty-five buildings in Waterloo Region, an equivalent of nearly 3 million square feet.
Laziridis demonstrated his bent for the furtherance of scientific curiosity by digging in $170 million of his personal wealth to establish the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, while his perpetrator in crime, Balsillie invested $100 million into the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Offering graduate programs in global governance, the School, was a three-way partnership among CIGI, UW and WLU. “A new building costing nearly $8 million would rise up beside CIGI on land leased from the city for $1 per year. The school would be financed with a $33-million donation from Balsillie and $25 million each from the two universities. CIGI would get more money as well, a $17-million endowment from Balsillie and $17 million in matching funds from the province.”And Doug Fregin and Balsillie topped up Lazaridis’s gifts to Perimeter Institute with significant contributions of their own. “The Institute for Quantum Computing took root at the University of Waterloo thanks to another whopping donation from Lazaridis and his wife Ophelia — this time $101 million — with Fregin chipping in $35 million of his own cash. And Wilfrid Laurier University decided to name its business school after Lazaridis when he gave $20 million to the institution for a new school focusing on high-tech entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, Michael Barnstijn, employee number three at RIM, and his wife, Louise MacCallum, also on the company payroll, sprinkled a total of $30 million around the area for a variety of causes including the Kitchener Waterloo Community Foundation, a museum in downtown Kitchener and a nature preserve in Cambridge.”
The success of RIM also birthed a raft of cutting-edge information technology companies whose presence gave Kitchener-Waterloo the status of Silicon Valley of the North. Open Text Corp, MKS, Descartes Systems Group, Com Dev, Dalsa Corp and Certicom all distinguished themselves in various specialized fields. Giving company to this “Waterloo Six” was Sandvine, a spin off from Pixstream, an entity that was acquired by Cisco when the former was at its prime only to be dumped a few months into the merger. Sandvine would grow into the largest global producer of hardware and software to help carriers manage their Internet networks, boasting annual revenues of $120 million US in 2016 and a workforce topping 700. Around this time, a group of entrepreneurs founded “Communitech.” The objective was to help one another build successful companies to help ensure the future prosperity of Canada. The organization was envisaged to support the entire “Community of Tech”. It’s enterprising President Iain Klugman, “moved the Communitech office to UW’s research park to partner with a tech incubator launched by the university called the Accelerator Centre. Hackathons, pitch competitions and workshops were held throughout the year, and tech celebrities and thought leaders were brought in from Silicon Valley and other tech hubs to inspire the troops during the annual Entrepreneur Week. The seven-day extravaganza also featured a film fest with documentaries and movies about the dot-com craze and tech luminaries such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.”
However, the euphoria at RIM would not last forever. Becoming more than a bit complacent and oblivious to the competition heating up around it, the Blackberry faced its first real challenge when Steve Jobs unveiled the sleek and spectacular iPhone. At the same time, the rollout of the Blackberry Pearl was facing some unique challenges. “The Pearl simply wasn’t easy to use without a corporate IT person walking you through the process. But these were former cellphone users. There was no IT person to show them how the device worked. “People going from a traditional cellphone had no idea what all the icons were, how to make a call, how to email, text because it was a huge leap,” Gibson [Lindsay Gibson, the woman driving sales within the company.] said. The engineers designing the hardware and software on the BlackBerry were not in touch with consumer needs and how they went about using a mobile device, Gibson said. In one case, participants were asked to set up the Bluetooth wireless connection on the device. One woman kept confusing the Bluetooth key with the menu key. Others had trouble getting the music player to work. Apple had not run into the same problem with the iPod. When it launched, consumers found it simple to use.”
When the supposed answer to the threat of the iPhone, The Blackberry Storm failed to garner the required and anticipated reception and reaction, the end was near for both Laziridis and RIM. Adding to the woes was a debacle involving the back dating of stock options and an investigation by the Securities Exchange Commission. RIM was forced to take an additional $30 million US charge against earnings, on top of the $220 million US for variable accounting violations. To atone for these errors, executives agreed to return any benefit from exercised options and re-price unexercised options granted at below market value. Balsillie agreed to step down as board chair, Kavelman was moved to chief operating officer and Balsillie and Lazaridis donated up to $5 million each to cover the costs of the review.” In January 2012, Laziridis and Balsillie stepped down from their positions and were replaced by Thorsten Heins, a former executive of Siemens in Germany. Eventually the name of the company was changed to Blackberry.
While Laziridis pursues his obsession with Quantum Computing, Balsillie has taken on the avatar of a policy maven. Acting as a government lobbyist , Balsillie is striving to pave the way for Canadian tech companies to scale into large enterprises and compete on the world stage. The rich ecosystem which these two giants created still throbs with excitement at Kitchener-Waterloo. Ample testimony to this fact is brought out by the presence of innovative companies and startups such as Vidyard, North, Clearpath Robotics, Aeryon Labs, Kik, Miovision, Magnet Forensics, Auvik Networks, Axonify, Ssimwave, and eSentire. M
While the primary focus of Mr. Howitt’s book revolves around Laziridis and the Blackberry, the quintessential theme animating his work is a seamless public-private partnership that worked overtime to put a region at the forefront of the global telecommunications and information technology map. Mr. Howitt’s fascinating story incubates (no pun intended) within the much-vaunted portals of the University of Waterloo (UW). A pesky, innately curious and zestful undergraduate takes it upon himself to seize most of an engineering Professor’s in-class and post-class time peppering the latter with questions on wireless communications. Laziridis the student and Professor Mohamed Elmasry were both acutely aware of the fact that the subject of wireless communications was not even part of the curriculum! This enthusiasm transformed into a full-fledged obsession when Lazaridis and nine other students piled into a van and drove all the way to Ottawa one weekend to listen to David Bohm, a legend among physicists, who had worked with Albert Einstein at Princeton University and was considered one of the most significant theorists in the field during the twentieth century.
The University of Waterloo turned out to be the perfect laboratory to fuel the aspirations of a young Laziridis. Boasting a phalanx of legendary computer engineers and physicists, by 1980, only two decades and a bit after its first intake of students, Waterloo had become a computer science “juggernaut in Canada and the world.” This stellar repute was the tireless efforts of the indefatigable James Wesley “Wes” Graham, popularly known as the “father of computing at UW. However, as Mr. Howitt illustrates, Graham was not the only superstar making the rounds at UW. The unassuming William Tutte with a PhD from Cambridge University immigrated to Canada in 1948 to accept a teaching position at the University. Recruited to UW by Ralph Stanton, head of math and the same unsung hero who brought Graham to the university, Tutte was a world-renowned expert in combinatorics, an obscure but important branch of math dealing with subjects such as optimization, graph theory and cryptography. “But Tutte was hiding a much greater secret than any of the calculations underlying his math theorems. During the Second World War, he had worked at the legendary British code-breaking office at Bletchley Park. Tutte and his team cracked the code behind one of the most important wireless machines used by the Germans to send top-secret messages. And they did it without having a working prototype of the device, known as the Lorenz machine. Unlike his more famous colleague Alan Turing, who used a prototype passed on by the Poles to crack the codes behind the Enigma machine, Tutte and his crew had only intercepted messages to work with. Sifting through those messages over four grueling months, Tutte slowly pieced together how the Lorenz machine was structured, then created an algorithm used to build an electronic computer called the Colossus. The computer, among the first in the world, was used to break Nazi codes for the rest of the war. Tutte and crew’s breakthrough was described as “the greatest intellectual feat” of the Second World War, but in a cruel twist of fate, no one heard about their heroics. After the war, the British government destroyed or classified all records from Bletchley Park and forbade any of its employees to share their secrets.”
It was no surprise then that the mercurial Laziridis was all worked up with inspiration with such a hallowed group surrounding him. Post tinkering with cathode ray tubes and computers to come up with a system to display text on a TV screen, Laziridis was convinced that it would be a cool way for companies to advertise their products. Summoning his childhood buddy Doug Fregin from Windsor, the pair launched their new enterprise in the spring of 1984. “Searching for a name for their startup, Lazaridis was idly watching TV one day when he saw a story about football players trying to improve their balance by taking ballet lessons. Printed across the bottom of the screen were the words “poetry in motion.” He had an epiphany and the name Research In Motion was born.”
A lucrative contract with Sutherland-Schultz, in addition to bolstering the revenues for RIM also brought into its fold an aggressive, ebullient man who along with Laziridis would shape the future contours of RIM – Jim Balsillie. “In 1992, Sutherland-Schultz was being sold and the new owners made it clear there would be no place for Balsillie. At this point, the ambitious Harvard grad was tired of playing second banana. He wanted to run his own operation and had a severance deal from Sutherland Schultz to help make it happen. It wasn’t quite big enough to purchase all of RIM, but Balsillie at least wanted a majority stake in the company. Lazaridis wasn’t willing to give up control of his baby but by this point had decided he couldn’t live without Balsillie on his team.”
The duo got to work on making RIM a force to reckon with. The start though was more than just a bit tepid. The Inter@ctive Pager introduced in the fall of 1996 received mixed reviews. “Corporate User magazine called it the top wireless product of the year, but Wireless Internet and Mobile Computer Newsletter, a widely respected publication, was not impressed. The pager is a good one, but “it’s a bit too heavy, bulky and expensive ($675 per unit) to attract many mobile professionals,” said Allan A. Reiter.” However, history would be made with the next product offering, the 950. However, Laziridis and Balsillie almost missed their date with destiny by a whisker. As Mr. Howitt illustrates, “although prototypes of the 950 weren’t ready, Lazaridis planned to use two industrial-foam mockups of the device as part of his presentation. But when he and Balsillie arrived for the crucial meeting, they realized that the mockups had been left in the taxi they had taken from the airport. Awkward moments ensued while the embarrassed RIM founder asked that someone call the cab company to retrieve the precious Leapfrogs. In the meantime, he stalled for time by laying out the business plan for the mobile email market and the fact BellSouth had first-mover advantage over its competitors. He described what the 950 would look like and how it would work. Thirty anxious minutes crawled by. The BellSouth executives seemed bored and unconvinced. All seemed lost when a BellSouth employee suddenly walked in with the missing mockups. Their arrival seemed to jolt everyone awake. As Lazaridis extolled the powers of the device, BellSouth executives passed them around. With tangible evidence of the 950 now in their hands, something they could feel and touch and look at, skepticism in the room gradually melted. Lazaridis’s confidence was infectious. The telecom bosses were enthralled. Lazaridis “had those guys thinking he would walk on water,” said Jim Hobbs, vice-president of BellSouth’s mobile data group.” Three cheers to the Atlanta taxi driver!
There was no looking back. In early 1999 RIM announced a new name for its sizzling wireless device. The BlackBerry. The name had come from a California firm specializing in corporate branding. “RIM evangelists, as salespeople came to be known, whipped out their BlackBerrys in airports and trade shows. Curious onlookers were soon enthralled by a device that could send and receive messages of up to 2,600 words in seconds instead of minutes, all on a battery that lasted up to three weeks. The BlackBerry was truly a data powerhouse.” This jump start of RIM kick started an economic boom in the hitherto quiet and calm region of Kitchener-Waterloo. With a workforce of more than 900, a market cap of $9.5 billion, double-digit revenue increases each quarter and ownership of seven buildings locally, RIM was on the road to becoming the most successful company ever to emerge from Kitchener-Waterloo. The real estate market attained stratospheric heights as at one point in time, RIM occupied more than twenty-five buildings in Waterloo Region, an equivalent of nearly 3 million square feet.
Laziridis demonstrated his bent for the furtherance of scientific curiosity by digging in $170 million of his personal wealth to establish the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, while his perpetrator in crime, Balsillie invested $100 million into the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Offering graduate programs in global governance, the School, was a three-way partnership among CIGI, UW and WLU. “A new building costing nearly $8 million would rise up beside CIGI on land leased from the city for $1 per year. The school would be financed with a $33-million donation from Balsillie and $25 million each from the two universities. CIGI would get more money as well, a $17-million endowment from Balsillie and $17 million in matching funds from the province.”And Doug Fregin and Balsillie topped up Lazaridis’s gifts to Perimeter Institute with significant contributions of their own. “The Institute for Quantum Computing took root at the University of Waterloo thanks to another whopping donation from Lazaridis and his wife Ophelia — this time $101 million — with Fregin chipping in $35 million of his own cash. And Wilfrid Laurier University decided to name its business school after Lazaridis when he gave $20 million to the institution for a new school focusing on high-tech entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, Michael Barnstijn, employee number three at RIM, and his wife, Louise MacCallum, also on the company payroll, sprinkled a total of $30 million around the area for a variety of causes including the Kitchener Waterloo Community Foundation, a museum in downtown Kitchener and a nature preserve in Cambridge.”
The success of RIM also birthed a raft of cutting-edge information technology companies whose presence gave Kitchener-Waterloo the status of Silicon Valley of the North. Open Text Corp, MKS, Descartes Systems Group, Com Dev, Dalsa Corp and Certicom all distinguished themselves in various specialized fields. Giving company to this “Waterloo Six” was Sandvine, a spin off from Pixstream, an entity that was acquired by Cisco when the former was at its prime only to be dumped a few months into the merger. Sandvine would grow into the largest global producer of hardware and software to help carriers manage their Internet networks, boasting annual revenues of $120 million US in 2016 and a workforce topping 700. Around this time, a group of entrepreneurs founded “Communitech.” The objective was to help one another build successful companies to help ensure the future prosperity of Canada. The organization was envisaged to support the entire “Community of Tech”. It’s enterprising President Iain Klugman, “moved the Communitech office to UW’s research park to partner with a tech incubator launched by the university called the Accelerator Centre. Hackathons, pitch competitions and workshops were held throughout the year, and tech celebrities and thought leaders were brought in from Silicon Valley and other tech hubs to inspire the troops during the annual Entrepreneur Week. The seven-day extravaganza also featured a film fest with documentaries and movies about the dot-com craze and tech luminaries such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.”
However, the euphoria at RIM would not last forever. Becoming more than a bit complacent and oblivious to the competition heating up around it, the Blackberry faced its first real challenge when Steve Jobs unveiled the sleek and spectacular iPhone. At the same time, the rollout of the Blackberry Pearl was facing some unique challenges. “The Pearl simply wasn’t easy to use without a corporate IT person walking you through the process. But these were former cellphone users. There was no IT person to show them how the device worked. “People going from a traditional cellphone had no idea what all the icons were, how to make a call, how to email, text because it was a huge leap,” Gibson [Lindsay Gibson, the woman driving sales within the company.] said. The engineers designing the hardware and software on the BlackBerry were not in touch with consumer needs and how they went about using a mobile device, Gibson said. In one case, participants were asked to set up the Bluetooth wireless connection on the device. One woman kept confusing the Bluetooth key with the menu key. Others had trouble getting the music player to work. Apple had not run into the same problem with the iPod. When it launched, consumers found it simple to use.”
When the supposed answer to the threat of the iPhone, The Blackberry Storm failed to garner the required and anticipated reception and reaction, the end was near for both Laziridis and RIM. Adding to the woes was a debacle involving the back dating of stock options and an investigation by the Securities Exchange Commission. RIM was forced to take an additional $30 million US charge against earnings, on top of the $220 million US for variable accounting violations. To atone for these errors, executives agreed to return any benefit from exercised options and re-price unexercised options granted at below market value. Balsillie agreed to step down as board chair, Kavelman was moved to chief operating officer and Balsillie and Lazaridis donated up to $5 million each to cover the costs of the review.” In January 2012, Laziridis and Balsillie stepped down from their positions and were replaced by Thorsten Heins, a former executive of Siemens in Germany. Eventually the name of the company was changed to Blackberry.
While Laziridis pursues his obsession with Quantum Computing, Balsillie has taken on the avatar of a policy maven. Acting as a government lobbyist , Balsillie is striving to pave the way for Canadian tech companies to scale into large enterprises and compete on the world stage. The rich ecosystem which these two giants created still throbs with excitement at Kitchener-Waterloo. Ample testimony to this fact is brought out by the presence of innovative companies and startups such as Vidyard, North, Clearpath Robotics, Aeryon Labs, Kik, Miovision, Magnet Forensics, Auvik Networks, Axonify, Ssimwave, and eSentire. M
Currently Reading
December 12, 2019The phenomenal success of the BlackBerry smartphone put the city of Waterloo on the radar of techies and ordinary citizens around the world. How did this achievement occur in a small city in Ontario? Chuck Howitt, in his book BlackBerry Town: How High Tech Success Played Out for Canada’s Kitchener-Waterloo, reveals how this achievement did not occur in a vacuum.
The University of Waterloo has been a breeding ground for technical advancement and the abilities of many graduates have created a number of successful companies in the high tech industry. Many of these companies are based in Waterloo and the twin city of Kitchener.
The rise and fall of BlackBerry is well known. What is less well known is the background that led to the success of the BlackBerry and the rise of many other high-profile companies in Kitchener-Waterloo. The high-tech industry has transformed the twin cities and its reputation is giving Toronto, the Hog Town of Ontario, a run for its money.
Gerald Weiler
The University of Waterloo has been a breeding ground for technical advancement and the abilities of many graduates have created a number of successful companies in the high tech industry. Many of these companies are based in Waterloo and the twin city of Kitchener.
The rise and fall of BlackBerry is well known. What is less well known is the background that led to the success of the BlackBerry and the rise of many other high-profile companies in Kitchener-Waterloo. The high-tech industry has transformed the twin cities and its reputation is giving Toronto, the Hog Town of Ontario, a run for its money.
Gerald Weiler
April 7, 2026
Author and journalist Chuck Howitt has written a very readable book that captures the excitement of a pivotal time in Waterloo's - and the world's - history. For anyone who lived in Waterloo Region in the '90s and early 2000s, this book explains why your neighbour who worked at Blackberry (and there were a lot who did) always looked so stressed.
You don't have to be a techy to enjoy reading Blackberry Town. Like Tracy Kidder's classic The Soul of a New Machine, Howitt's book is about the people, not the tech, but the technology is explained in clear language so readers can understand the issues.
If you liked the movie Blackberry, this is the real story. Howitt was there, reporting for the local paper on the rise of the company, and now he has written a book sourced from insiders he encountered in his reporting. But this is far more than a local story. This is a definitive history of the beginning of the smartphone age.
You don't have to be a techy to enjoy reading Blackberry Town. Like Tracy Kidder's classic The Soul of a New Machine, Howitt's book is about the people, not the tech, but the technology is explained in clear language so readers can understand the issues.
If you liked the movie Blackberry, this is the real story. Howitt was there, reporting for the local paper on the rise of the company, and now he has written a book sourced from insiders he encountered in his reporting. But this is far more than a local story. This is a definitive history of the beginning of the smartphone age.
September 15, 2020
Being a long time user of Blackberry phones this book was really interesting for me to read and it was unstoppable as I got to learn many things as I was going through the content/story. The book talks about the ups and downs of blackberry, birth of technology sector in Waterloo and beyond. This is surely one of the best reads of 2020 in tech genre for me. The book provides immense knowledge about Canadian technological history and all the insides into the country - Canada’s business stories. Inspirational and informational.
October 6, 2021
I really enjoyed BlackBerry Town, having been a loyal Blackberry owner for many years. When we moved to Waterloo in the mid-nineties, it was all everyone was talking about. I was intrigued to learn about the inside story of the early tech history, and the people involved – Chuck did an excellent job of describing the personalities behind the headlines and how they developed not only the Blackberry but the entire tech sector in Waterloo Region - an important part of Canadian history. Well written and great detail. Thanks for telling this fascinating story of Waterloo Region’s tech sector, Chuck!
November 4, 2019
Good balance between technical detail, general reader interest and creative, entertaining phrasing
There is so much more going on in KW then I ever imagined. This book is very enlightening and detailed. the author has an insightful grasp of the developments and trends in the Canadian Tech industry. It is amazing to see how one thing leads to another and all the interactions that make it happen. A very insightful study and an easy to read writing style.
There is so much more going on in KW then I ever imagined. This book is very enlightening and detailed. the author has an insightful grasp of the developments and trends in the Canadian Tech industry. It is amazing to see how one thing leads to another and all the interactions that make it happen. A very insightful study and an easy to read writing style.
November 4, 2019
I really enjoyed reading Blackberry Town. I didn’t realize the influence the University of Waterloo had in the development of Blackberry and all the spin-off businesses that were created because of both establishments. A very interesting read.
April 30, 2021
This crisply-written survey is more than a history of an immensely popular gizmo and its Canadian incubator.
Chuck Howitt entertainingly details how a serendipitous influx of talent and a standards-shattering vision of higher education can transform a heretofore unremarkable urban area into a digital powerhouse. The resulting dynamism nurtures brilliant minds exploring such areas as quantum computing, global survival and, yes, the small but vital pieces of hardware and software that define modern living. The immense wealth BlackBerry brought to Waterloo spurred the development of a robust economy that spurs universities and savvy entrepreneurs to envision a technological future that promises discoveries far surpassing the lifespan of any single device.
Chuck Howitt entertainingly details how a serendipitous influx of talent and a standards-shattering vision of higher education can transform a heretofore unremarkable urban area into a digital powerhouse. The resulting dynamism nurtures brilliant minds exploring such areas as quantum computing, global survival and, yes, the small but vital pieces of hardware and software that define modern living. The immense wealth BlackBerry brought to Waterloo spurred the development of a robust economy that spurs universities and savvy entrepreneurs to envision a technological future that promises discoveries far surpassing the lifespan of any single device.
February 6, 2021
With the dominance of Apple and Google on the mobile phone market in the last decade, I feel puzzled and sorry for the two earlier leaders in the space – BlackBerry and Nokia. Both were dominating mobile giants and not from the USA. BlackBerry was from Canada, a country I have travelled to briefly on a weekend trip to Vancouver from Seattle. Even today in tech circles I hear people talking with high regards for the technology chops of BB. As a result, I always wondered where the company stumbled and this book “BlackBerry Town” by Chuck Howitt will shed some light to it.
As I started reading the book (a review copy on request was shared to me by the author’s office) I quickly realised it is not exclusive to the rise and fall of a single company, the Research in Motion (RIM) aka BlackBerry. Before reading the book, I would’ve found it difficult to identify in a world map where was BlackBerry’s hometown Waterloo was – it is about 100 kilometres from Toronto. The book is a well-researched work about the fertile soil of the twin cities of Kitchener-Waterloo that has given birth to quite a few technology companies whose products we might have used without being aware of their origins. The reality-distortion (borrowing the term from Steve Jobs) of Silicon Valley outshines us blind to the happenings every else, especially to its northern neighbour.
The book starts with the time Mike Lazaridis, the co-founder of Research in Motion was a student in the wireless communications class at the University of Waterloo (UW). Even as a student Lazaridis was well-informed about the latest inventions in the space and had keenness to keep learning, so it was no surprise he went on to run one of the iconic technology companies.
Howitt then takes us on a journey about 60 years ago to the founding of the University of Waterloo by its first President Gerald Hagey. He created an engineering program that was well-rounded with students getting an opportunity to learn from literature, history, politics and humanities. The university with its Cooperative education (combining classroom-based education with practical work experience) would prove to be disruptive. Today, UW operates the largest post-secondary co-op program of its kind in the world, with an enrolment of 19,800 students and 6,700 employers. And its computer science department under James Wesley Graham would become famous with many Silicon-Valley employers. Graham had created innovative high school math contests to attract the brightest to the young university. He also created the Computer Systems Group, the equivalent to modern-day incubators. An earlier success from this was Watfor (Waterloo Fortran) compiler which led to the creation of one of the well-regarded compilers for C/C++, the Watcom. Another success was Open Text, the multi-billion-dollar tech giant, which germinated from a search engine build by the department for the Oxford English Dictionary. Another spinoff from UW was Maplesoft, the software for Mathematics.
The book will be a treasure for the residents of the twin city of Kitchener-Waterloo and for Canadians, but for those who are not, it felt a bit too much to take in. There are many pages devoted to how the real estate business in the city skyrocketed and then crashed matching with the fortunes of Research in Motion and on how tech news reporting worked in the local newspapers. There were many biographies of lesser-known (no disrespect to them) figures who had worked hard for the city’s tech ecosystem but these quickly starting to feel like reading Wikipedia entries. The non-linear narrative style made it difficult to mind map the various happenings that led to the rise and fall of BlackBerry as a company. In its coverage of RIM, the book leaves out a large number of years in between – I was curious to know what happened from their early years of success to the arrival of Android in the scene – but the book has little details on those years.
Thanks to Chuck Howitt’s BlackBerry Town, I got to learn a lot about the University of Waterloo and the ecosystem in the region.
As I started reading the book (a review copy on request was shared to me by the author’s office) I quickly realised it is not exclusive to the rise and fall of a single company, the Research in Motion (RIM) aka BlackBerry. Before reading the book, I would’ve found it difficult to identify in a world map where was BlackBerry’s hometown Waterloo was – it is about 100 kilometres from Toronto. The book is a well-researched work about the fertile soil of the twin cities of Kitchener-Waterloo that has given birth to quite a few technology companies whose products we might have used without being aware of their origins. The reality-distortion (borrowing the term from Steve Jobs) of Silicon Valley outshines us blind to the happenings every else, especially to its northern neighbour.
The book starts with the time Mike Lazaridis, the co-founder of Research in Motion was a student in the wireless communications class at the University of Waterloo (UW). Even as a student Lazaridis was well-informed about the latest inventions in the space and had keenness to keep learning, so it was no surprise he went on to run one of the iconic technology companies.
Howitt then takes us on a journey about 60 years ago to the founding of the University of Waterloo by its first President Gerald Hagey. He created an engineering program that was well-rounded with students getting an opportunity to learn from literature, history, politics and humanities. The university with its Cooperative education (combining classroom-based education with practical work experience) would prove to be disruptive. Today, UW operates the largest post-secondary co-op program of its kind in the world, with an enrolment of 19,800 students and 6,700 employers. And its computer science department under James Wesley Graham would become famous with many Silicon-Valley employers. Graham had created innovative high school math contests to attract the brightest to the young university. He also created the Computer Systems Group, the equivalent to modern-day incubators. An earlier success from this was Watfor (Waterloo Fortran) compiler which led to the creation of one of the well-regarded compilers for C/C++, the Watcom. Another success was Open Text, the multi-billion-dollar tech giant, which germinated from a search engine build by the department for the Oxford English Dictionary. Another spinoff from UW was Maplesoft, the software for Mathematics.
The book will be a treasure for the residents of the twin city of Kitchener-Waterloo and for Canadians, but for those who are not, it felt a bit too much to take in. There are many pages devoted to how the real estate business in the city skyrocketed and then crashed matching with the fortunes of Research in Motion and on how tech news reporting worked in the local newspapers. There were many biographies of lesser-known (no disrespect to them) figures who had worked hard for the city’s tech ecosystem but these quickly starting to feel like reading Wikipedia entries. The non-linear narrative style made it difficult to mind map the various happenings that led to the rise and fall of BlackBerry as a company. In its coverage of RIM, the book leaves out a large number of years in between – I was curious to know what happened from their early years of success to the arrival of Android in the scene – but the book has little details on those years.
Thanks to Chuck Howitt’s BlackBerry Town, I got to learn a lot about the University of Waterloo and the ecosystem in the region.
August 26, 2020
Taking a break from my steady diet of fiction (reading and writing), I devoured Churck Howitt's Blackberry Town in a few days (actually, late nights). I'm used to drama - both heroics and hubris - in my reading but here it was in a business book focused on the community where I lived for many years, the university I attended (University of Waterloo), the newspaper where I worked and, critically, the brilliant but flawed risk takers in the network of high tech firms nurtured by the makers of the Blackberry. A former colleague at the Record, Howitt covers the big stories in the rise and fall of the tech firms and exposes some of the behind the scenes plots by talking to key players in the sector. Blackberry Town is an apt title as the book illustrates how that famous smart phone helped shape the Kitchener-Waterloo community - its business envronment, politics, universities and non-governmental organizations. It's a great read for locals but I would recommend it for anyone interested in business, the shaping of communities - and good old fashioned drama.
November 13, 2020
This book went beyond just talking about the Blackberry which is what I thought it was initially about. What a surprise!! The book has some history that led to the rise of tech entities and so many other related products all from one small town and university. What an impact the University of Waterloo had. Well written with quite some background information about the main characters which I found gave the reader a look into the people behind the technology and products and also about the characters that helped them become successful and also led to some of the challenges that they faced. The book further showed a sneak peek into the people behind this technology who then went ahead to do and influence in other spheres around the world such as governance. What a surprise. The impact of the Blackberry went just beyond the phone. A really exciting story which I enjoyed immensely.
November 26, 2019
Blackberry Town is the story about two entrepreneurs from Waterloo, Ontario who created the smart phone and revolutionized the way we communicate.
Author Chuck Howitt chronicles the rise and fall of Blackberry, but also documents how the startups inspired by Blackberry helped secure Waterloo's role as a major player in North America's tech sector.
There were other benefits. The region was rewarded time and time again as Blackberry's founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie pumped millions of dollars into ventures including Perimiter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Centre for International Governance.
Having served many years as a veteran reporter and editor at the Waterloo Region Record, Howitt is the perfect choice for someone to write the Blackberry story.
Author Chuck Howitt chronicles the rise and fall of Blackberry, but also documents how the startups inspired by Blackberry helped secure Waterloo's role as a major player in North America's tech sector.
There were other benefits. The region was rewarded time and time again as Blackberry's founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie pumped millions of dollars into ventures including Perimiter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Centre for International Governance.
Having served many years as a veteran reporter and editor at the Waterloo Region Record, Howitt is the perfect choice for someone to write the Blackberry story.
November 28, 2019
BlackBerry Town is unlike what some people call business books, and that is why this is such a compelling read. This book tells the story of Research In Motion, but it also gets at the root of how a company like this can sprout from a city that, outside of Canada, was not terribly well known. The author unearths the stories you won't find in a typical business book. He covers much more ground than RIM and really does paint a complete picture of how innovation happens in Waterloo and how this mindset first took hold. He even talks about the legacy of RIM's braintrust and how their work has continued behind the scenes. I get the impression that this is an ongoing story. I can't recommend it enough. Written with flair and heart, Chuck Howitt is an author you need to get to know.
January 3, 2020
I found this book to be very interesting and informative. I thought I had a good sense of the story from the news media, but I found the depth of knowledge and the multiplicity of angles that the author brought to this thorough study of one of Canada’s biggest business stories was a real eye opener. I believe it will stand the test of time as a document chronicling our economic history. The book shows that nothing happens in a vacuum and that many aspects of life and business are interconnected. It is also a darn good read.
May 19, 2020
Well written and quite fascinating - even for non-techie and non-business types! Chuck Howitt deserves praise for what must have been a gruelling task at times.
However, not to take away from the book's obvious value - BlackBerry leading the way to Waterloo Region's important position as an internationally recognized tech hub - it's regrettable that the fallout includes the unaffordable cost of housing here, for ordinary mortals. The exploitation by developers and the real estate industry is dismaying.
However, not to take away from the book's obvious value - BlackBerry leading the way to Waterloo Region's important position as an internationally recognized tech hub - it's regrettable that the fallout includes the unaffordable cost of housing here, for ordinary mortals. The exploitation by developers and the real estate industry is dismaying.
November 14, 2020
Back then when blackberry was shining I was very young. but as I grew up i kept wondering what had happened to black berry , it's smartphones used to be very popular . After I read this book I got an insight of what was going on ! My dream as a child up until now has been to work in a tech company especially smartphone related . Thanks to Mr Howitt's informative book I learned a lot about the ups and downs that happen in this industry .
I loved this Tech related journey to the past . A joy to read .
I loved this Tech related journey to the past . A joy to read .
December 9, 2020
Interesting - Yes 4
Informative - Yes. 3
History - yes. 2
Recommendation - depends, if you want to read more about the starting era of smartphone this book will help you to get exact pictures of market then and the impact BlackBerry created.
Whole book is not all interesting but overall it is.
Book is not highly recommend for any specific section of people like from tech background but in general it's for all. Curious souls here is one treat for you.
Thanks
Informative - Yes. 3
History - yes. 2
Recommendation - depends, if you want to read more about the starting era of smartphone this book will help you to get exact pictures of market then and the impact BlackBerry created.
Whole book is not all interesting but overall it is.
Book is not highly recommend for any specific section of people like from tech background but in general it's for all. Curious souls here is one treat for you.
Thanks
April 21, 2021
A captivating read . Rigorous research went into this book about a massive success on Canadian soil . Kitchener- Waterloo have their fingerprints all over vanguard technology across North America as a result of it being ground zero for attracting brilliant minds and enterprising innovation for decades . BlackBerry is an incredible yarn of course but what I found equally fascinating was all the smaller stories that Chuck Howitt brings to light about other Canadian success stories. Bravo!
December 12, 2020
This is a really great book so far. The story told here is truly special because this is a thing happening right now. It’s so interesting to read the book. I still remember my dad having a blackberry and then suddenly wondering why his work gave him an iPhone 5. And then no Blackberry at all over the word. Such a crazy time. Really a must read
January 14, 2021
Blackberry town is an inspiring story. A kind of grass to grace story of how Research In Motion started from humble beginnings to reach a height unprecedented for a Canadian Company.
Also for historical purposes it sheds a lot of light on the Company much of which is not known and which can go a long way to further appreciate what impact Blackberry had at its peak.
Also for historical purposes it sheds a lot of light on the Company much of which is not known and which can go a long way to further appreciate what impact Blackberry had at its peak.
January 30, 2020
I lived in Blackberry Town in the time described and the book brought me right back there. Chuck also had a lot of insights about the influences and influencers. He brings us right up to current day and why Waterloo Region is thriving today.
November 15, 2020
Good insight into how KW has grown with (and without) Blackberry.
March 6, 2024
I enjoyed reading this!
This book is an enormous rundown of personalities and engineers, which the author excellently pulled up through its tendency to bore the readers.
As I devour the insides of the book, the author persuasively nailed down its conviction. And I am convinced undoubtedly, these engineers, academic and political personalities, and most of all, the twin towns’ ordinary people gathered altogether and contributed to the discovery and to the eventual change of the landscape and standard of digital communication.
The BlackBerry made a dent! It holds a benchmark in the development in terms of wireless communication. The collective effort of Lazaridis and everyone in RIM became the outliers, the pioneers, the avant-garde of times. It placed the cities of Kitchener and Waterloo of Canada to its pedestal and became known to the world as the center of technology innovation. It secures the rank of the University of Waterloo as one of the global bests and most sought-after universities in Engineering.
As I go along with the book, I experience the humble beginnings of BlackBerry. I feel the exhilarating excitement of its ladder to stardom. Understand the intoxicating peak of its success. I empathize with its painful ebb and defeat. Finally, I immerse in that natural feeling of finding hope manifested by the decisiveness of the company to pick up the pieces, to recover the momentum, and to reinvent itself.
Chuck Howitt, the author, regales us stories along his extraordinary and well-meaning journey to the twin towns of Kitchener and Waterloo—home of the techies—the BlackBerry Town. In the end, the writer made a masterpiece, for me, a history revealed poignantly and with no-nonsense capsulized in just 256 pages.
This book is an enormous rundown of personalities and engineers, which the author excellently pulled up through its tendency to bore the readers.
As I devour the insides of the book, the author persuasively nailed down its conviction. And I am convinced undoubtedly, these engineers, academic and political personalities, and most of all, the twin towns’ ordinary people gathered altogether and contributed to the discovery and to the eventual change of the landscape and standard of digital communication.
The BlackBerry made a dent! It holds a benchmark in the development in terms of wireless communication. The collective effort of Lazaridis and everyone in RIM became the outliers, the pioneers, the avant-garde of times. It placed the cities of Kitchener and Waterloo of Canada to its pedestal and became known to the world as the center of technology innovation. It secures the rank of the University of Waterloo as one of the global bests and most sought-after universities in Engineering.
As I go along with the book, I experience the humble beginnings of BlackBerry. I feel the exhilarating excitement of its ladder to stardom. Understand the intoxicating peak of its success. I empathize with its painful ebb and defeat. Finally, I immerse in that natural feeling of finding hope manifested by the decisiveness of the company to pick up the pieces, to recover the momentum, and to reinvent itself.
Chuck Howitt, the author, regales us stories along his extraordinary and well-meaning journey to the twin towns of Kitchener and Waterloo—home of the techies—the BlackBerry Town. In the end, the writer made a masterpiece, for me, a history revealed poignantly and with no-nonsense capsulized in just 256 pages.
August 20, 2021
the book succeeds in giving a human aspect to giant corporates. i personally have no deep understanding or knowledge of engineering, business or computers but i was able to follow the events described in the book- which is a huge accomplishment in itself. the language is easy to understand and the flow is smooth. the only trouble i had was keeping up with the several characters who were part of the process but i guess that's a given when an industry as big goes through its boom. the book starts with introducing the founder of blackberry Mike Lazaridis as an eager and forward thinking freshman at UW. it follows his journey in setting up RIM- his first business venture. the journey is pretty exciting especially from when the pager is first developed. from there on we just witness its meteoric rise. eventually we do see downfalls and legal battles and increasing competition from Apple's iPhone; but the book succeeds in showing us a complete evolution arc with deep and personal insight into the business.
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