“Mike Lazaridis was home on his treadmill when he saw the televised report about Apple Inc.’s newest product. Research In Motion’s founder soon forgot about exercise that day in January 2007,” Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff report for The Wall Street Journal. “There was Steve Jobs on a San Francisco stage waving a small glass object, downloading music, videos and maps from the Internet onto a device he called the iPhone.”
“‘How did they do that?’ Mr. Lazaridis wondered. His curiosity turned to disbelief when Stanley Sigman, the chief executive of Cingular Wireless joined Mr. Jobs to announce a multiyear contract with Apple to sell iPhones,” McNish and Sean Silcoff report. “What was Cingular’s parent AT&T Inc. thinking? ‘It’s going to collapse the network,’ Mr. Lazaridis thought.”
“The next day Mr. Lazaridis grabbed his co-CEO Jim Balsillie at the office,” McNish and Sean Silcoff report. “‘These guys are really, really good,’ Mr. Lazaridis replied. ‘This is different.’ ‘It’s OK — we’ll be fine,’ Mr. Balsillie responded. RIM’s chiefs didn’t give much additional thought to Apple’s iPhone for months.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Mmm, delicious! Why stop at one little piece when you can have an entire schadenfreude cake?
We can’t wait to plow through this one: Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish
We can just imagine DCW’s half-CEOs staring blankly at each other with mouths agape hoping for a answer that never came. Amateur Hour, indeed.
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Ousted half-CEO Lazaridis to step down from beleaguered BlackBerry board on May 1 – March 28, 2013
Former RIM half-CEO Jim Balsillie dumps all BlackBerry shares – February 14, 2013
Beleaguered RIM’s half-CEO lying; BlackBerry 10 OS is a failure that won’t be able to compete, source says – December 22, 2011
RIM’s half-CEO Lazaridis walks out of BBC interview – April 13, 2011