Dead and Berried: How Ego and Ambition Blew Up the World’s First Smartphone
It was the device every high-flyer HAD to have. Meet the outrageous man who drove the BlackBerry to insane heights - until the iPhone killed it virtually overnight.
good.film
2 years ago
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Why should I see BlackBerry?
A fascinating slice of history, BlackBerry’s complex clash of an engineering genius and a volcanic salesman is exquisite to watch. If you loved The Social Network or AIR, BlackBerry is definitely your jam.
What social causes does the film explore?
Science & Technology, Democracy & Society
If you really, really concentrate, you can rewind your mind to a time when we weren’t all entranced by those glowing glass rectangles we call smartphones (go on, put down your phone now and try it). You don’t have to go back far - 20 years, tops. Imagine it! No earbuds. No Android. No App Store. No iPhones at all.
But there WAS a device that the corporate world was obsessed with, handling calls, email and messaging all in one. It became so lusted after, and so impossible to put down, the phone jokingly became known as “CrackBerry”. As Wired put it, “Kim Kardashian was glued to hers… Barack Obama ran the free world from his.” It was wide, and some say ugly - with its full physical keyboard, BlackBerrys had even more bumps & bulges than the tasty little fruits that gave them their name.
That didn’t stop sales though. At its peak in September 2011, BlackBerry commanded an astounding 45% of the mobile device market, making nearly $20 billion in revenue from over 85 million BlackBerrians (can we call them that?) worldwide. For comparison, the world’s most dominant smartphone today - Apple’s iPhone - has a “mere” 28% market share.
BlackBerry’s market share today? 0%. That’s not a typo - ZERO. It begs the question, how does a company implode like that? Who built the device that captured nearly half a market, and rocketed a flailing tech startup into the stratosphere? And what forces plummeted BlackBerry from those heights to its spectacular crash back to Earth?
That spot on Earth was actually Ontario, Canada, the home of BlackBerry the company, and BlackBerry the film - a gripping new comic-drama directed by Canadian Matt Johnson. The film is inspired by the Canadian business journalism book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry - although the unkind might suggest it’s perhaps less ‘book’ and more ‘obituary’.
What is BlackBerry about?
It’s 1996 - more than a decade before the iPhone - and a plucky pair of Canadians, Mike and Doug, meet businessman Jim Balsillie to nervously pitch their idea for a new cellular device: “PocketLink”. Jim tells them it’s the single worst pitch he’s ever heard, but his shrewd business spidey-sense sees potential in a phone that relies on a free wireless signal. Massive potential.
Jim offers to quit his job on the spot, in exchange for a CEO title and, outrageously, half of their company. Doug chokes out a ‘No way!’, but Mike recognises they lack what Jim has in spades: sheer cunning. He’s a shark, and they need him. Mike musters up the balls to talk him down to 33%, and Jim immediately gets to work: hiring key staff, threatening creditors and arranging a pitch with a huge telco. He’s a tornado in a suit and tie, and he forces Mike & Doug to slam together a crude (but working) prototype of their first BlackBerry literally overnight.
“You know who’s afraid of sharks? Pirates.” ~ Mike Lazaridis, BlackBerry CEO
It’s the first example of sales dictating to engineering, not the other way around, and it sets up a key friction that’s a recurring theme in the film. Jim sets seemingly impossible targets, and ruthlessly kills the jovial, prankish vibe in the office - smashing phones and shutting down their nerdy Raiders of the Lost Ark marathons. Monster, right? But here’s the thing - it works.
He runs white-hot, but Jim is the exact kind of fuel that Mike & Doug’s rocketship of an idea needs to get off the launchpad. The BlackBerry explodes thanks to Jim’s innovative marketing and corporate hunter mentality. He’s out for blood, and he gets it.
Soon, Jim quadruples the stock price. Next, he deliberately oversells BlackBerrys to an overloaded network. Then, he poaches Google and Apple’s best engineers to solve the network problem - wooing them with stock options that make them instant millionaires. It’s a dizzying ride that results in an astronomically successful product, and it’s a thrill to see Jim’s devilish plans pay off big. And it’s all laced with the sinking feeling that this BlackBubble is, eventually, going to burst.
Is it internal tensions that bring BlackBerry undone? Or the ego of a man who takes the company jet to buy an entire NHL hockey franchise? How about the hostile takeover attempt from PalmPilot - or the ever-increasing sniffing around from the SEC into those questionable stock options?
Nope, the biggest threat lies in a new device with an Apple on it - one that Mike waves off as “a toy for morons”... because it has no buttons at all. It’s an ego-driven, short-sighted take that eventually proves fatal. We know it, and we’re about to watch them learn it.
What does BlackBerry have to say about technology?
BlackBerry does a great job of reminding us how technology can magically bewitch humankind. New innovations arrive like manna from heaven, only to be dumped when the newer, better version comes along. The film uses zippy grabs of real footage to put us there - like news reports showing lines around the block, or clips of Oprah demoing the latest BlackBerry to her crazed audience (some of them are literally swooning).
As context clues, inserting these little time-machine bites of real-life are a clever touch. By rewinding us back to a time when this was peak tech, it ramps up our investment in the characters, their conflicts and their goals. Through our current-day lens, we also get a chuckle at the naïveté of 2000’s consumers being excited out of their skin for something that’s pretty much like a fax machine for us today.
“It’s not a cell phone. It’s a status symbol.” ~ Jim Basillie
But BlackBerry actually says more about the people behind the tech, and a system that rewards innovation while risking the consumers who are exposed to it - that is to say, all of us. A handful of dorky twenty-somethings in ‘Doom’ and ‘Zelda’ T-shirts could be coding an idea one day that millions of people are glued to the next.
With great power comes great responsibility, right? And yet, those engineers aren’t equipped to consider the repercussions of their actions. Facebook was born out of a “prank website”, created by a pair of bored dormroom pals as a game to rate attractive college girls. Barely 15 years later, that site had metamorphosed into a behemoth with incalculable influence; including over arguably the most important US election in a generation.
It’s a disturbing disparity that director Matt Johnson was keen to emphasise in the film. “I think Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin had 20/20 vision, but only six feet in front of their face,” Johnson said in a recent interview. “They had no idea what the impact of this was gonna be. You laugh at these guys and go, ‘Oh, these guys aren’t really that special’, and yet they are solely responsible for the smartphone culture that we live in right now. And I think that their story might be useful to people long after we’re no longer using smartphones.”
What does BlackBerry have to say about ambition?
Part of BlackBerry’s magnetic watchability is how it captures the power struggle that inevitably plays out between sharklike salesmen with zero tech knowledge, and brilliant techs who are terrible at sales. Or public speaking. Or even stringing a sentence together.
Each need the other. Each, frankly, disgust the other. And neither party can believe the other side “don’t get it”. When Mike insists their prototype be perfect, Jim asks if he’s ever heard the phrase “Perfect is the enemy of good.” To which Mike mutters back, “Yeah, but ‘good enough’ is the enemy of humanity”. The grit in that oxymoronic oyster? They’re both right.
The engineers aim to build a better mousetrap: they’re hyper-focused, and don’t want to compromise on build quality or speed. But Jim’s ambition is a power of magnitude greater: he wants to take that BlackBerry and put it in a million hands overnight. He literally forces the device into powerbrokers lives, paying show-offs to use BlackBerrys in country clubs and Wall Street bars. “Make people notice you,” Jim tells them. “I want them thinking, “What is that asshole talking on? And how do I get one?”
“I played him as someone who had something to prove at almost all times.” ~ Glenn Howerton, on his role as Jim Basillie
Call it ego, or an Icarus complex, or just plain asshole-ishness. But the brutal reality is that in the world of business tech, steel trap savagery really shifts units. Sporting a bald cap and a lupine physique, actor Glenn Howerton is truly volcanic as “co-CEO” Jim Balsillie. And it’s tempting to take Jim’s take-no-prisoners ambition and label him the “villain”. But that’s something director Matt Johnson pushes back on.
“It’s very rare to find people who are truly evil and successful,” Johnson told The Verge. “It’s very hard to get people to work with you if you’re an evil person. If you spent time with the real Jim Balsillie, you’d be like, “Ah, this guy’s great.” And even when I watch him in the film, he’s the guy I’m rooting for, because he seems to really sincerely want it. Also, those guys were going fucking nowhere if it weren’t for Jim showing up and being like, “Alright, look. Unfortunately, you need this prototype done tomorrow or we’re going bankrupt.”
What are critics saying about BlackBerry?
- “A riotous, fiery kind of comedy whose subterfuge is so subtly stage-managed that you don’t see the cans of gas fuelling the flames higher and higher.” | GLOBE AND MAIL
- ”A smart movie about smart people who were destroyed by a dumb system that eats people like Mike Lazaridis alive.” | ROGEREBERT.COM
- “One of the best business biopics I’ve seen; it’s a roller coaster you can enjoy riding all the way up, but it’s not afraid to question its own climax the whole way down.” | THE ATLANTIC
- ”A deliriously entertaining story of tech, hubris and swimming with sharks. It's all fun and games until the water starts running red.” | DETROIT NEWS
Fully on board, or disagree big time? We’d love to hear your take. Leave a review to share your thoughts with the good.film community!
So what’s the takeaway from BlackBerry?
With its nightmarish recipe of clever engineering meets ravenous salesmanship, BlackBerry makes for a darkly comic and fully engaging cautionary tale that could - and probably should - be mandatory viewing in business schools. The cherry on the cake? It’s all based in truth.
At just $5 million, the film clearly lacks the budget of similar rise ‘n’ fall flicks (we’re looking at you Air, The Dropout, The Social Network and The Wolf of Wall Street), and you won’t find any Damons or DiCaprios yelling ‘Eureka!’ at their million-dollar ideas here.
But BlackBerry makes up for that with a rattling conveyor-belt of scathing dialogue and a prowling, ob-doc camera style that makes you feel totally embedded in this time & place in tech history. First, the euphoria of their ‘CrackBerry’ cracking the market, followed by the lies, subterfuge and desperation that soon takes hold to keep it there.
Just knowing that BlackBerrys went the way of the dinosaurs gives the film a sort of ‘ticking time bomb’ feel. Let's be real, no-one in the cinema was putting their BlackBerry on silent when the lights went down, so we know the company hit the skids in a spectacular way. The fun lies in finding out how the BlackBerry became, as an agonised Doug puts it, “the thing people used before they used the iPhone.”
If you’re morbidly fascinated in corporate rags-to-riches… and back-to-rags-again stories, BlackBerry is a juicy treat with a very tangy aftertaste.
