I bet you have heard this story: Canada’s largest company by market capitalization in May 2008 is now a hollow shell of its former self, shedding customers and employees and having sales crumble from $21 billion to $8 billion in three disastrous years.
Poor Waterloo, Ontario… home of BlackBerry and many of its 12,000 employees (at the peak). Losing all those jobs (4,500 announced recently) and suffering the first and second order economic impact will take a toll on the once vibrant city and region. The shame of a failed company is hanging around Waterloo like a stench. Vancouver should be so lucky.
I am not kidding. We should be so lucky as to have a monstrous failure in our city. Why? Because we have never had a monster in the first place. The long-term benefits of a monster technology company far outweigh the short-term displacement of a failure of that company.
BlackBerry shareholders might not take comfort in that statement, but the truth is that they were a world beater for a few years, which has enormous long-term benefit for one reason: the talent that was attracted to work there.
The nation is busy doing the hand-wringing over the loss of “yet another” global technology company and all of us have become Monday-morning quarterbacks tsk-tsking the stupid decisions leading to the downfall.
It’s OK, people.
Waterloo will be stronger from this dismantling of BlackBerry, and the nation as a whole will be better off. BlackBerry was not some Groupon-like company that emerged out of nowhere and then swooned shortly thereafter, leaving a trail of shareholder lawsuits and no real value in its employee base.
The company formerly known as RIM started in 1984. I would argue that many of BlackBerry’s first 10,000 employees are extremely talented engineers, product managers, integration experts, security gurus and salespeople that were part of a massive growth company that defined a global market. There should be no under-estimating the value of being in that growth maelstrom and understanding how to succeed on a global scale. If you were along for that ride, you have a leg up on every technology company employee in Canada yet to get there.
Unlike the first failed Canadian behemoth, Nortel Networks, BlackBerry will not enter a fire sale on behalf of its creditors (it has no debt), and we shouldn’t lose all the valuable intellectual property for cents on the dollar. Nortel managed to enrich Sweden with the wireless patents that Ericsson practically stole. I don’t see that happening here.
Speaking of Nortel, have you been to Ottawa lately? It is abuzz with new startups based on innovation from world-class engineers, who happened to be part of a big failure. As an aside, I found this nugget in my research for this article: Nortel invested $25 million into BlackBerry in 2000. Oh, the irony…
This is a glass-half-full analysis on my part. It sucks that BlackBerry didn’t outwit Apple and Google.
But I see the wildly successful Communitech accelerator in Waterloo absorbing new talent for startups. Google itself is hiring hundreds of people in Waterloo. If you were a wireless security startup or an enterprise-class mobile application company, wouldn’t you be hiring in Waterloo?
My friend Donavan Jones at Vancouver’s CounterPath just did for his Ontario office. His quote: “These are awesome engineers.”
While we see the unwinding of wealth created by BlackBerry now, the fact is that it created enormous wealth on the way up. Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute, which was built for studying the building blocks of the universe, was completely funded by BlackBerry wealth. Heck, it was close to having an NHL team as well.
The point is, Waterloo is full of very smart, very experienced people who will create, innovate and grow new companies based on lessons learned. I am very happy for them, despite their pain. •
