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Sign up todayLosing the Signal
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreIn 2009 BlackBerry controlled half of the smartphone market. Today that number is 1 percent. What went so wrong?
Losing the Signal is a riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed. The rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway.
With unprecedented access to key players, senior executives, directors, and competitors, Losing the Signal unveils the remarkable rise of a company that started above a bagel shop in Ontario. At the heart of the story is an unlikely partnership between a visionary engineer, Mike Lazaridis, and an abrasive Harvard Business School grad, Jim Balsillie. Together they engineered a pioneering pocket email device that became the tool of choice for presidents and CEOs. The partnership enjoyed only a brief moment on top of the world, however. At the very moment BlackBerry was ranked the world’s fastest-growing company, internal feuds and chaotic growth crippled the company as it faced its gravest test: Apple and Google’s entry into mobile phones.
Expertly told by acclaimed journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, this is an entertaining, whirlwind narrative that goes behind the scenes to reveal one of the most compelling business stories of the new century.
Jacquie McNish is a senior writer with the Globe and Mail and before that the Wall Street Journal. She has won seven National Newspaper Awards and is the author of several bestselling books, two of which won the National Business Book Award. She lives in Toronto with her husband and two sons.
Sean Silcoff is a business writer with the Globe and Mail and a two-time National Newspaper Award winner. He lives near Ottawa with his wife and three children.
William Hughes is an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. A professor of political science at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon, he received his doctorate in American politics from the University of California at Davis. He has done voice-over work for radio and film and is also an accomplished jazz guitarist.
Reviews
“In Losing the Signal, Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff tell the harrowing and riveting story of how we lost the connection to the BlackBerry, a communication device so innovative and addictive that it was known, among aficionados, as a Crackberry. It’s a tale of rivalries, jealousies, and missed opportunities. You won’t be able to put it down.”
“Losing the Signal is a good old-fashioned insider’s business narrative, the kind we don’t see enough of these days, and it should scare the pants off most CEOs.”
“Losing the Signal…fills in some details of the early history of BlackBerry. And its later chapters offer gripping details about the emotional and business turmoil surrounding its near collapse…This was a company that had $20 billion in revenue and changed the way we communicated. It’s not likely we’ll see that lightning strike again.”
“In the tech industry, they say that you learn more from a failure than from a hit. Well, if that’s true, Losing the Signal will give you a postdoctoral education. Reading the inside story of the BlackBerry’s helpless flameout is like watching any other train wreck: you’re horrified, but you can’t look away.”
“Unflinching.”
“There have been many books about the smartphone maker, but none of the authors has had the same level of access to Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Balsillie as the duo behind Losing the Signal.”
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