Quotes from Jacquie McNish

Fred Vogelstein summed up iPhone's impact that day in his book Dogfight with a quote by Google engineer Chris DeSalvo: "We're going to have to start over.

In the technology sector failure is often a precondition to future successes, while prosperity can be the beginning of the end. If the rise and fall of BlackBerry teaches us anything it is that the race for innovation has no finish line, and that winners and losers can change places in an instant.

The key was stealthily leveraging and launching, then asking for forgiveness

Shortly after Lazaridis decided to cut his ties to RIM, he drove to a Waterloo electronics store. Preparing for what he regarded as an unthinkable future without keyboard BlackBerrys, Lazaridis emptied the store's shelves of BlackBerrys, filling a large box with his purchases. "The most frightening thought," he says, "was that I wouldn't have a BlackBerry.

In technology, failure is often a precondition to future successes, while prosperity can be the beginning of the end

good academic students were discouraged from taking technical courses, even if the student intended to study engineering at university.

Apple changed the competitive landscape by shifting the raison d'être of smartphones from something that was functional to a product that was beautiful. "I learned that beauty matters.… RIM was caught incredulous that people wanted to buy this thing.

RIM's chief saw the semiconductor giant as a dangerous, tricky heavyweight whose every employee lived by former CEO Andy Grove's mantra, "Only the paranoid survive.

EVERYBODY HAS PLANS UNTIL THEY GET HIT. —MIKE TYSON

On a less public stage he meets a few times a month with Canadian technology entrepreneurs. He grants each visitor about an hour in a session that is part speed dating, part talent show. In these encounters, he plays the tough judge, brusquely challenging their technology, strategies, and financing as a way of preparing them for the kinds of predators that once threatened RIM.

Innovation could not thrive without corporate support and effective commercial strategies.

In March the two sides announced a settlement. NTP's persistent demand for royalties was off the table. Instead RIM would pay NTP a lump sum of $612.5 million. Thomas Campana did not live to see his case validated. The heavy smoker died of cancer in 2004. NTP's law firm, Wiley Rein, pocketed $245 million of the settlement, the largest contingency fee earned by any U.S. law firm that year.

Growing heated as he talks about the lost opportunity, Balsillie stops and bows his head. Rubbing a clenched fist back and forth across his forehead, as if trying to remove some hidden stain, he ends the conversation. "I must not go back to the life of commerce," he says.

What we were showing was very futuristic," Neale says. So futuristic no one visiting the enchanted forest realized the display was still a fantasy. None of the machines actually worked on Mobitex yet. The terminals were wired into a computer simulating radio transmissions.

I had an expression: Never moon the gorilla," Balsillie says. "Microsoft was the gorilla. We cut them by far the widest berth of anyone." Balsillie's strategy for dealing with Microsoft was to undersell RIM's potential. Upon launching BlackBerry, he pitched the device to Microsoft as a pager-like service to promote the software giant's corporate e-mail software, Exchange.

Balsillie followed two Sun Tzu tactics religiously: appear strong no matter how weak your hand; and move to uneven terrain if an aggressor is overwhelming. For Balsillie, rugged ground meant keeping competitors, suppliers, and customers off balance.

Eventually, Morrison realized that work was the only language the two men shared. When he wasn't talking about RIM, Lazaridis was rhapsodic about technology breakthroughs and quantum physics. Balsillie's enthusiasms were sports, traveling, and business celebrities who were starting to pay attention to BlackBerry's founders.

If the rise and fall of BlackBerry teaches us anything it is that the race for innovation has no finish line, and that winners and losers can change places in an instant.

more lucrative dates. The scheme was not properly disclosed