Losing the signal
by Jacquie McNish · first published 2015
64% recommend36% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Well-paced account of BlackBerry's rise and fall, with detail on carrier pressure from Verizon and AT&T and on the company's misjudgment of the iPhone; suits anyone curious about mobile history or corporate failure.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"In 2009, BlackBerry controlled half of the smartphone market. Today that number is less than one 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 rem
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The book Losing the Signal goes into detail about this. They thought their existing advantages of the keyboard, battery life, durability, and network efficiency would be enough to retain customers. By the time they realized they…
on “BlackBerry Failed to Respond to the iPhone” ↗This was a good read - Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Signal-Extraordinary-Spectacul...
on “Ask HN: Favorite books about failed/declining companies?” ↗…Cantrill (of Oxide Computer) and co did a podcast a couple of months ago recommending books of a similar vein[1]. I’m not sure if it was mentioned in that episode, but they did another one on the book Losing the Signal about the ride and fall of Blackberry[2] which is worth checking out. [1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/book-in-the... [2] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/losing-the-...
on “Rereading: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder” ↗The history of technology is something that's better covered in trade publications, magazines and biographies, rather than textbooks and academic journals. Here's what I'd recommend: - Losing the Signal (Blackberry, 1990s-2013) - Founders at Work (dotcom era) - Masters of Doom ('90s PC video game market/graphics)
on “Ask HN: Good Books on the History of Technology?” ↗Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth
on “Ask HN: Books like Androids:The Team That Built the Android Operating System?” ↗…people did hard things to be very motivating and therapeutic, especially when facing a difficult task myself! I’ve enjoyed all of these; they were all recommendations from HN. Showstopper - Windows NT Losing the Signal - BlackBerry Made in Japan - Sony Piloting Palm - Palm Sweating Bullets - PowerPoint Folklore.org - Early Apple. The “Mac Folklore Radio Podcast” [0]. Has a few interesting stories of people innovating…
on “Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things” ↗The real story is more complicated, and covered very well in a book called "Losing the Signal", written by journalists at the Globe & Mail. RIM had an engineering-first culture that was attuned to the needs of enterprise customers and wireless carriers first and foremost. Those customers prioritized…
on “With no brand license, Blackberry Mobile fades to black” ↗Definitely give Losing the Signal - The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry[0] a read if you're interested in the genesis of mobile. In many ways Google was actually late in comparison to Apple,…
on “How Google bought Android” ↗…control Steve Jobs wanted over the devices. AT&T agreed to get the exclusive. BlackBerry was King when the iPhone launched and BlackBerry bent over backwards to do whatever the carrier wanted (the book Losing the Signal has great details on this). Google could have depended on similar provisions with Verizon when the Droid launched in 2009 or with T-Mobile when the G1 launched in 2008. Both carriers wanted an iPhone…
on “Malicious apps infect 25M Android devices with 'Agent Smith' malware” ↗To anyone who has a fond recollection of BlackBerry, I recommend the book "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry". It's well paced and captures a lot of atmosphere (from what I recall). And "Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm,…
on “People Keeping BlackBerry Alive” ↗Sadly phone companies cannot exist in a vacuum. In the book "Losing the Signal" there's great evidence that Blackberry faced far more pressure than merely losing market-share. Their push-based email service (the back end) previously existed as the only of its kind for phones, then…
on “Truly unified inbox – BlackBerry got it right and nobody has since” ↗…really like is "The Everything Store" that is a brief history of Amazon.com and the challenges they faced as one of the few high-profile survivors of the dotcom boom. Another I've enjoyed reading is "Losing the Signal", which covers BlackBerry's rise and fall, starting from its origins in the 1980s to its struggle to adapt to the consumer smartphone age. It's a great read because BB originally began as a telecom engineering…
on “Ask HN: How to build business acumen?” ↗…and put all their energies into the launch of the already-doomed BB10 phones in 2013. More here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside... A good book about the history of BB is "Losing the Signal". Covers the company up to around 2013.
on “BlackBerry to turn BBM secure-messaging system into subscription service” ↗You might be interested in "Losing the Signal", a book about BlackBerry's rise and fall by Globe & Mail Journalists. It starts with Mike Lazaridis (the main BB engineer) adventures in repairing electronics in shop class in the '70s, to developing…
on “Ask HN: What's a good history of technology book?” ↗Looking back, I’m more and more convinced it was Verizon’s need for an iPhone clone that killed them. The book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry goes into a lot of detail about their decisions and that looked like the big problem. Something like the Passport earlier…
on “BlackBerry cofounder Jim Balsillie is sounding the alarm about surveillance” ↗