Will there be a next RIM?

On a global scale? Sure, but in the context of a Canadian tech company getting that big again, I want to say unlikely.

Why have we not had any real innovation in this country in almost 20 years?

We’ve had some real innovation, but quite frankly most of the tech world simply isn’t that innovative. Blackberry astutely capitalized on being some of the first to recognize the utility of the Smartphone but that opportunity only really came around once in the past 30 years.

The only other opportunities to make that kind of money and impact, were maybe advertising driven social media like Facebook, and now with the AI boom there’s that level of money but it’s spread between chipmakers like NVidia and ai companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. But even the AI boom isn’t as big of a boom / change as the smartphone was. Maybe with Quantum Computing and a company like D-Wave we’ll see it again, but there simply aren’t going to be that many huge new markets like we witnessed with the birth of smartphones.

And realistically the modern tech and corporate landscape also make it even less likely to have a Canadian success like that. The wealth disparity between the trillion dollar tech titans and new startups mean that virtually every single current Canadian startup’s plan is to get acquired. I’ve interviewed at like 10 different startups and spoken with a bunch of friends at others, and none have the kind of long term thinking or drive to try and turn their company into an empire the way Balsillie did. They’d all rather cash out and accept a massive check from Google or Amazon or whatever. And it’s understandable given the size of payouts and the level of risk and drive it takes to truly build a massive global business, but it also means that I seriously doubt we’ll see anything like RIM again here.

I also just watched the BB movie last night and it was great, but it did make me pretty sad to think about what might have been.