In my playbook, BlackBerry failed.
Not because Apple won.
Not because Android scaled faster.
But because the original Research In Motion could not survive its own success.
Early RIM was something rare.
It concentrated outliers.
It optimized for craft.
Engineers bonded. Built. Experimented.
There was flexibility. There was intensity. There was identity.
It looked less like a corporation and more like a modern guild.
Then scale arrived.
Money arrived.
Pressure arrived.
And with them came the sharks.
Professional managers.
KPIs.
Deadlines.
Market optics.
None of this is evil.
But it changes the operating system.
RIM did ship massively successful products.
Yes, they reached enormous scale.
But the original organism did not survive.
The company that today carries the BlackBerry name is almost genetically unrelated to the early RIM.
Different people.
Different culture.
Different mission.
Some call that adaptation.
In my playbook, that’s a structural failure.
Because the experiment was not just about building a phone.
It was about proving that a craft-driven organization could scale without becoming corporate.
That experiment did not succeed.
Apple didn’t just out-design them.
Entropy out-scaled them.
Real stories like this are not nostalgia.
They are warnings.
If you want to build something craft-driven, you must design mechanisms that preserve identity under scale pressure.
Otherwise, success becomes the beginning of dissolution.
Optimizing for longevity is harder than optimizing for growth.
But it is the only way to preserve a soul.
