How a Waterloo pager company took over corporate email
Research In Motion was founded in 1984 in Waterloo, Ontario, by Mike Lazaridis and his school friend Douglas Fregin. For its first decade the company did contract engineering on wireless data: point of sale terminals, barcode readers and radio modems. Jim Balsillie joined as co-chief executive in 1992 and took over sales and finance while Lazaridis ran engineering.
The product that made the company was the BlackBerry 850, a two way pager released in 1999. It could not place calls. What it did was push email to a device in your pocket the moment the message arrived, onto a keyboard small enough to type on with two thumbs.
The other half of the business mattered more than the hardware. BlackBerry Enterprise Server let a corporate IT department hand out hundreds of devices, encrypt the traffic and wipe a lost handset remotely. RIM was not really selling phones to people. It was selling a managed, secure email system to companies, and the handsets came with it. Wall Street adopted it first, then law firms, then anyone with a corporate expense account.
How big did BlackBerry get at its peak?
Big enough that the habit got its own word. Webster's New World College Dictionary named "crackberry" its word of the year for 2006, a term that covered both the device and the person who could not put it down.
The money peaked in fiscal 2011, the year that ended in February 2011, when Research In Motion reported revenue of $19.9 billion, up 33 percent on the year before. BlackBerry was the default smartphone of corporate North America and standard issue in Washington and on Wall Street.
BlackBerry Messenger did something the company never planned. BBM was free, instant and tied to a PIN instead of a phone number, and it turned a business tool into a teenage social network in Britain, Indonesia and Nigeria. Trading BBM PINs was how a generation swapped contact details before WhatsApp existed.
The peak was also the trap. Every part of RIM was built around physical keyboards, compressed data and corporate IT buyers at the exact moment the market moved to touchscreens, app stores and consumers choosing their own phones. Nokia and Palm were caught by the same shift in the same years.
What did RIM say when the iPhone launched?
Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone on January 9, 2007. According to "Losing the Signal", the 2015 account of the company by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, Lazaridis pulled Balsillie in front of a computer to watch the webcast and told him: "These guys are really, really good. This is different."
Balsillie was unimpressed. His reply, reported by Forbes in 2015, was "we'll be fine".
The technical objections were all accurate in 2007. The first iPhone had no physical keyboard, no 3G radio, no app store and no enterprise email management. RIM executives told the authors of that book that the device was not secure and that it drained its battery. Every one of those complaints was true, and none of them mattered.
What RIM evaluated was a handset. What Apple had shipped was a platform. The App Store opened in July 2008, Android phones arrived the same year, and within two product cycles the question of what a phone was for had changed from email to everything.
Why BlackBerry 10 could not stop the slide
RIM's first touchscreen answer was the BlackBerry Storm in November 2008, a screen that physically clicked when you pressed it. It satisfied neither touchscreen buyers nor keyboard loyalists.
The PlayBook tablet followed in April 2011 and shipped without native email, calendar or contacts apps, which meant a BlackBerry tablet needed a BlackBerry phone tethered to it to read mail. In December 2011 RIM warned that it would take a charge of roughly $485 million on unsold PlayBook inventory.
Lazaridis and Balsillie both stepped down as co-chief executives in January 2012 and were replaced by Thorsten Heins. The company renamed itself BlackBerry and launched BlackBerry 10 alongside the Z10 and Q10 handsets on January 30, 2013.
The software was decent and the timing was fatal. BlackBerry 10 arrived with roughly 70,000 apps against more than 700,000 each on Apple's App Store and Google Play. Developers had no reason to build for it and buyers had no reason to switch. BlackBerry left the handset business in 2016 and licensed the name to TCL instead. In the fourth quarter of 2016, Gartner counted 207,900 BlackBerry OS handsets sold out of 432 million smartphones worldwide, a share that rounded to 0.0 percent.
Who owns BlackBerry today?
Nobody in particular. BlackBerry Limited is a public company listed in New York and Toronto under the ticker BB, still headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, and run since December 2023 by chief executive John Giamatteo. There is no parent company and no private buyer.
What it sells has changed completely. The Cylance security business, bought in 2018 for $1.4 billion, went to Arctic Wolf for $160 million in a sale that closed in February 2025. Two divisions are left. QNX builds the embedded operating system inside car dashboards, instrument clusters and driver assistance systems, and BlackBerry said in December 2025 that Counterpoint Research had found QNX software running in more than 275 million vehicles. Secure Communications sells encrypted messaging and crisis alerting to governments and defense agencies.
In fiscal 2026 BlackBerry reported revenue of $549.1 million, made up of $268.0 million from QNX and $258.9 million from Secure Communications, with a QNX royalty backlog of $950 million. On the earnings call Giamatteo said: "The turnaround is complete, and the BlackBerry story is now a growth story." Guidance for fiscal 2027 is $584 million to $611 million. It is a real business, and it is under 3 percent of the fiscal 2011 peak.
Do old BlackBerry phones still work?
Not as phones. BlackBerry switched off the services behind BlackBerry OS 7.1 and earlier, BlackBerry 10 and the PlayBook on January 4, 2022. Devices running those systems lost data, calls, text messages, BBM and, over carrier networks, emergency calling. A BlackBerry OS handset now joins the Motorola Razr V3 in the category of phones with no network left to reach.
The exceptions are the Android handsets TCL built under licence, the KEYone of 2017 and the Key2 of 2018. Those run Google's software rather than BlackBerry's own, so they never depended on the servers that went dark in 2022.
TCL's licence ended in 2020. A startup called OnwardMobility picked it up in August 2020 and promised a 5G BlackBerry with a physical keyboard, missed every deadline it set and shut down in February 2022 without shipping a device. Nobody has held the licence since.
Where to find one today. A BlackBerry in 2026 is a desk object rather than a working phone, and what a handset costs depends entirely on the model, the condition and whether the battery still takes a charge. Sellers list Bold, Curve and Pearl units, often with the original box and charger, on Etsy. Check the model number in the listing and ask the seller whether it powers on, because nothing running BlackBerry OS will connect to a network again.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does BlackBerry still make phones?
No. BlackBerry stopped making its own handsets in 2016 and licensed the name to TCL, which sold Android powered BlackBerry phones until that licence ended in 2020. A startup called OnwardMobility held the licence from August 2020 and closed in February 2022 without shipping a device. BlackBerry Limited has sold no handsets of any kind since.
Who owns BlackBerry now?
BlackBerry Limited is not owned by another company. It is a publicly traded firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker BB, based in Waterloo, Ontario, and led by chief executive John Giamatteo since December 2023. Its Cylance security unit was sold to Arctic Wolf in a deal that closed in February 2025.
When did BlackBerry phones stop working?
BlackBerry shut down the services behind BlackBerry OS 7.1 and earlier, BlackBerry 10 and the PlayBook on January 4, 2022. From that date those devices lost data, phone calls, text messages, BBM and emergency calling over carrier networks. The Android based BlackBerry phones TCL built, such as the KEYone and Key2, were not affected.