From everything I read and know about RIM, the enterprise level BlackBerry systems were unbreakable to governments and the keys were generated and controlled entirely by the customers (not by RIM). The pissed-off governments demanded access and threatened to ban RIM--the market leader at the time. I think the first to demand access was India and RIM put up a years-long fight against them before they capitulated.
It's easy to say that they should have taken a principled stand and lost the market. (In a similar vein, RIM had to pay a slimy patent troll $612.5 million dollars [not a typo, more than half a billion!] by a certain deadline otherwise the judge in the case would have banned them from the entire US market until they had a trial. The patents in question were ludicrously obvious and should never have been granted. I'd like to have seen RIM take a stand and fight the troll, but I can forgive them for having chosen not to go bankrupt.)
At the other extreme of corporate misconduct, are you aware that AT&T has been giving the call records (meta data) of every person in the United States to the NSA for decades? If Snowden's info is correct, they even allowed live tapping into phone calls for every phone call that passed through their network.
Furthermore, here's a quote from the article you linked to: "RIM, unlike rivals Nokia and Apple, operates its own network through secure servers located in Canada and other countries such as Britain." I have a high degree of respect for Apple (and somewhat for Nokia), but isn't it odd that RIM was being targeted by the host country but Nokia and Apple weren't? Perhaps they had a way to monitor communications (or at least get meta data) on Nokia and Apple phones, but they couldn't monitor RIM because RIM maintained its servers outside of the country.
In summary, cut some slack on RIM. RIM did use good encryption and did put up a fight. Many other companies have done and are doing much much worse.