The rise and fall of BlackBerry

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the early 2000s, BlackBerry was the phone that ruled the world. But within a decade, it collapsed, overtaken by the touch screen revolution.

Sam Gruet speaks to former co-CEO Jim Balsillie about BlackBerry’s meteoric rise, its battle against Apple, and the moment he knew it was all over.

Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest; the disastrous D-Day rehearsal; and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.

(Photo: BlackBerry phone in 2002. Credit: Rob Homer/Fairfax Media via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism.
0:08.9	In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero?
0:16.1	Simply doing your job, being a decent human being.
0:20.0	A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by
0:23.1	their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism
0:27.8	with me, Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Sam Gruet,
0:41.7	and the rise and full of a little device that changed the way we talk and became the centre of world events.
0:51.0	Do you give the authoritarian what he wants, or do you just say, I didn't do a tech company to allow totalitarians to kill protesters?
1:02.3	It's January 2011, and tech boss, Jim Balsali, is about to pick up a phone call from Egypt's capital.
1:10.0	I've been in Cairo and Mubarak's state security guy at a previous visit wanted to meet
1:16.8	and they just want to meet you.
1:19.7	Egypt's president Hosni Mabarak had been in power for nearly three decades.
1:24.4	But a wave of protests known as the Arab Spring was sweeping through the Middle
1:29.4	East, powered by social media and an encrypted messaging service that authorities couldn't access,
1:36.9	BlackBerry Messenger or BBM.
1:39.6	I get a call from them that they pulled the plug on Blackberry in Egypt because they're
1:43.8	protesting in to hear square and they said, give us the keys. Yes. had a call from them that they pulled the plug on Blackberry in Egypt because they're protesting
1:44.5	and to hear Square and they said, give us the keys, the encryption keys, we're not going
1:50.3	to turn Blackberry back on.
1:51.9	And what did you do?
1:53.0	Told him to go stuff himself.
1:58.8	Long before then, we're going back to 1998 and the headquarters of a small tech firm in the Canadian town of Waterloo.
	...

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