Film Review: BlackBerry
anarchonomicon.substack.com
anarchonomicon.substack.com
Personally, I didn't find either the book or the movie astoundingly insightful, and in my opinion both lacked a grounding in enough technical understanding to truly explain the market forces that were working against RIM. My full review of the book is here: https://www.observationalhazard.com/2018/09/book-review-losi...
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/qnx-software-systems
So yeah, I think maybe I'll stick with Metacritic for the movie reviews.
> Of course, Research in Motion imploded spectacularly… Blackberry went from controlling over 50% to now controlling 0% of the cellphone market, Alberta’s oil industry has been destroyed by a decade-plus of willful misgovernance, and Canada’s long national suicide continues even as it’s doctors encourage it’s citizens to opt for physician-assisted suicide rather than burden the system with their depression, homelessness, or wounds sustained in their country’s wars…
Really? That much self-hate? Then stop voting in governments full of shallow, vapid people based on how they look, or how much money they give away. People deserve the governments they elect.
[0] https://nationalpost.com/opinion/dennis-kavelman-i-was-a-lon...
And as sibling says, while NP has a clear slant, it's hardly Fox News level.
In any case, the quoted section blends right in with rest of the blog. And really the whole post blends in with the rest of blog, especially the choice to end with the post talking about the fundamental role of faith (and belief) in success.
When your chief export market for your product (the US) is also now the world's top oil exporter, sitting on its own reserves of oil, and the oil you're exporting requires heavy processing and is of generally lower quality... You're gonna have a bad time. New pipelines won't save you.
So then their party-of-choice wasted a decade fighting to build infrastructure to export to China... who also doesn't need our product.
It's froth-at-the-mouth rabid partisan bullshit, and Canadians need to learn to see through this crap. (Narrator: "they, didn't though")
Alberta's government was captured long ago by oil industry shills who are increasingly angry at their own failures and looking for someone to blame and balkanizing the country in the process, and the National Post plays along, every year becoming more and more shrill.
There really have been economic pressures, but government interference via legislation or executive orders killing the Keystone pipeline also play a massive role in the ongoing issues.
As for government interference, could as much say things in the other direction: the Alberta government and the federal Harper government, aggressively subsidized -- both economically through direct subsidizes or preferential tax treatment, and ideologically through aggressive campaigns the development of the oil sands and oil and gas exploration and exploitation in the province generally.
It has never been free from "interference"; pre-Trudeau or present.
But the country as a whole, and the world's climate, does not owe Alberta the progress of this sector. Alberta needed to diversify yesterday. Instead it's doubled down, and now it's blaming everyone else in the nastiest way; down to banning the development of renewables and actually deliberately kneecapping diversification along with an aggressive propaganda campaign of lies. It's almost comical, but actually it's f'ing enraging.
Line 9 runs right behind my house, like 1 or 2km away. It carries Alberta oil to Ontario and Quebec, where 90% of oil/gas consumption is domestic and the remainder imported from the US. A fact not apparently recognized in Alberta, where bullshit propaganda about "Saudi oil tankers in the Gulf of St Lawrence" runs rampant.
Grew up there, family still there, held thoughts for years of going back. After this last provincial election and what's falling out of it? Never. Folks like Smith are like the Slobodan Milosevics of Canada; vicious ideological shit disturbers balkanizing and building a personal empire out of lies and division, and the end result of it -- as should have been clear from what happened last winter in Ottawa and Couts, etc. -- is going to to get really really ugly.
It's down to numbers. It costs about $40 to produce a barrel of oil in the sands. When the price is above that mark, it's profitable to produce and sell. When it's lower, it's not. That's the supply side.
On the demand side, oil is sold on the global market, US is a large customer but certainly not the only one. There is always a market for oil. The key is transportation. Alberta is a landlocked province, it needs a transportation infrastructure to get the product to market. Canada has the third largest reserves of oil on the planet, and the world uses oil for far more than gasoline engines. To leave it in the ground when there's so much demand is folly. It should be harnessed for the betterment of the country.
Why can't we be like Norway and use the profits from oil to make our energy infrastructure greener? Why does it have to be a zero-sum game?
In the end: We need to be done with hydrocarbons, like yesterday. And the people who've staked their political livelihood to it realize this, and they're distorting the entire political culture out of desperation to hold onto what they have.
We can set the vitriol aside and discuss this point, as this is where we disagree. Our way of life is almost entirely dependent on hydrocarbons. Forget gasoline cars and diesel trucks, we can't even build roads or medical devices without them. Just take a look at a saline IV. We have no substitute for the flexibility and durability of plastic. Pick any item in your house, it's everywhere. Same with lubricants, they are in everything. Electric motors require brushes and lubricants too. Switching wholesale will cause will be very costly, and without acceptable substitutes, cause a huge reduction in the quality of life. It's essentially economic and lifestyle suicide. And for what? Canada contributes ~2 percent of global emissions. Reducing that to zero still won't make a dent in global emissions. China and India just need to build a few more coal plants to make up the difference. Meanwhile we will have destroyed our way of life irrevocably.
It's far more pragmatic to have a slow, phased rollout of eco-friendly technologies. Alternatives have to be built and tested to show that their total ecological footprint is lower. In many cases, the alternatives don't even exist yet. They need to be designed first. Look at paper straws, turns out they're impossible to make without plastic, and the plastic used is completely under-studied. It leaches into the drink and is more likely than not toxic. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, feel-good thinking is not a substitute for science.
Climate change is a global problem. Whether we like it or not, our part to play in it is quite small. We should do what's best for the country and its people.
Absolutely Alberta and others will continue to supply the world with hydrocarbons for generations to come. But that is not the same argument as demanding that the entire nation chip in to ensure that the sector be aggressively expanded.
Saying the world needs plastics and lubricants is hardly an argument for expanding -- significantly -- production. This is an argument I hear often from folks in Alberta like it's some sort of "oooh gotcha" moment, but it's frankly insulting. Yes, we all know how stuff is made. They're not telling us anything we don't know. They're not smarter about fossil fuels because of their proximity to it. Just insanely and heavily biased.
What Suncor and others and the Alberta taxpayer and energy sector wants is not a trickle of oil used for those purposes -- it's what any corporation wants: year over year growth, large profits for stock holders, revenues for governments, and jobs -- lots of jobs -- for Albertans.
Unfortunately that growth is not compatible with the ecological scenario of the planet. And the rest of the country is under no obligation to shift policy and economic planning for it.
And this 2% number is an absolute distortion of the facts and simply a product of cherry picking how things are measured. North Americans impact on the climate isn't just from their direction product & emissions, but also from the imports they bring in from abroad. Emissions from Chinese factories producing products for western consumers is not "China's fault" that somehow absolves us such that we can aggressively turn around and increase emissions.
What we're seeing demonstrated here is just classic deflection of responsibility. The bias within the western energy sector will always be to find "facts" to back up a world in which they can continue to grow and, in fact, destroy the climate. Intelligent people should be able to see past this.
In the end, Alberta provides oil and gas for domestic consumption, and that's not a bad role. Contrary to what Kenney was saying when he was premier, the large majority of domestic consumption does in fact come from Canadian (primarily Albertan) production, and has since the mid-2010s when the direction on Line 9 was reversed. Only the Atlantic provinces are substantially importers.
Alberta must diversify. Amazingly it actually was, at the level of renewable energy production, and ... you can see what a threat that was to established energy sector interests, because one of the first things Smith did was to put an end to that.
Finally, there seems to be a misperception in Alberta that the energy sector and Alberta are somehow underwriting the whole Canadian economy such that Ontario and Quebec "owe" it something. This is a falsehood. As a % of GDP, even for exports, oil & gas is still behind manufacturing, despite the multi decade decline in that sector. Share prices on the TSX are one thing, dollars and cents in paycheques and gov't coffers on the whole are driven by manufacturing, real estate, agriculture, etc., too.
Check out Canada's rating from 2017. It's 1.66%. The source: A 2022 report commissioned by the EU. Must be a terrible blow to your "absolute distortion of facts." Are you going to try a No True Scotsman fallacy?
Got any data from credible sources to support any of your assertions? Or is it all just dogma? Is it even possible to have a rational discussion on this topic which so much zealotry? Where's the science?
> Alberta must diversify. Amazingly it actually was, at the level of renewable energy production, and ... you can see what a threat that was to established energy sector interests, because one of the first things Smith did was to put an end to that.
If it ended, it was unprofitable, a failed business model. It didn't make money. It's that simple. Businesses chase profit. Oil is pursued because it is profitable. What you are saying is that Alberta should pursue less profitable directions to benefit the world. Why should it do that?
I'm not even going to touch NEP or equalization given how messy it has become over decades of political interference. It's not possible to have such a discussion in the forums.
> Unfortunately that growth is not compatible with the ecological scenario of the planet. And the rest of the country is under no obligation to shift policy and economic planning for it.
You don't know the first part of that. No one does. And the second part, it's more about bringing policy and economic planning to the status quo, rather than destroying the economy of the country which the current climate-driven agenda is achieving. When Alberta sells more oil, our country's tax base benefits as well.
> Absolutely Alberta and others will continue to supply the world with hydrocarbons for generations to come. But that is not the same argument as demanding that the entire nation chip in to ensure that the sector be aggressively expanded.
Forget aggressively expand, it's currently being strangled. If Alberta was a coastal province, this would be a moot point. Right now, the rest of the country is holding Alberta hostage. I can see it and I'm not even Albertan.
In the real world, the Alberta gov't literally just banned renewal energy projects because they were too* successful.
https://www.theenergymix.com/2023/08/03/alberta-slaps-6-mont...
https://www.bennettjones.com/Blogs-Section/Albertas-Pause-on...
https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/some-communities-oppose-alberta-...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/smith-pause-solar-win...
https://calgaryherald.com/news/alberta-announces-pause-on-re...
No, it's not that simple. Only for the simple minded. Follow the money, you're being played.
Why indeed? You might recall there was a federal government that attempted to engineer this kind of scenario, 40ish years ago, in the form of the National Energy Program. I grew up hearing all about the horrible NEP and the horrible things it tried to do to Alberta... We're still living with the fall-out from that, and in large part .. a lot of the western hate for Trudeau Jr. is deflected flack from Trudeau Sr's attempt to enact what you just asked for.
At least Lougheed made an attempt at something like what Norway has in the form of the Alberta Heritage Fund. But it didn't go far enough and has been chipped away at by his successors.
I'm sure if Alberta had proposed that to the feds -- that instead of collecting carbon tax revenue that it take money from oil revenues and invest it in a green energy fund -- the feds would have been fine with that. They were fine with the Ontario/Quebec/California cap'n'trade system before Ford killed it.
But you know that Alberta would never accept or suggest such a thing.
I blame party politics. We could get great people elected locally if they didn't have to move in lockstep to one of three to five simplistic marketing brands.
It seems to me that the underlying reason that the spectrum providers were no longer willing to pay RIM was because customers wanted to use alternative products that didn’t saddle the carriers with the those extra costs.
If Apple and Android hadn’t come around, BlackBerry would have had a lot more leverage.
The Blackberry devices were an icon of the corporate world and Wall Street; like a Rolex, it told the world you were important. It's that image that got Fortune 100 companies to order the things in droves and pay for the expensive servers.
I ran my first startup at this time and it was exactly the same as the first scene, where were all playing Red Alert on the network after work.
- Don't imitate them and steadily cede market share
- Imitate them and immediately alienate your user base
I often wonder what they really should have done?
Is it a tragedy, though? I think most companies are doing well if they manage to return billions to their initial shareholders by exploiting a breakthrough product for a few years. Companies aren’t meant to last forever. They exist to enrich shareholders for a while - hopefully a long time, but everyone realizes most companies eventually are bought or fail due to changing market conditions.
A bit of a shame that never came to fruition honestly
I could appreciate the need for the incumbents to come up with _something_ to counteract the iPhone wave, but it all seemed rather hopeless at the time.
But they all wanted their own proprietary thing, even today. Blackberry came really close to getting major telecoms onboard for adopting BBM as their over the top replacement, but it never closed (iirc they argued about price).
I feel that if telecoms realized what they are, which is infrastructure dumb pipes, things like interoperable standards would be easier for them to adopt. Look at the failure of Verizon trying to diversify, they just shut down BlueJeans (a zoom competitor) and haven't really done much with Yahoo since acquisition.
They could have pivoted to Android earlier. I had a BlackBerry Q10 and their BB10(QNX) was actually pretty good (the unified messaging was amazing at the time), but it was clear even then that without proper Android app/ecosystem support, it was always doomed to struggle. (their clever emulator was great, but wasn't enough). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXewkl5K7-M
When they finally did pivot to Android, their phones were pretty good (I carried the "BB Priv" for a long time, and the KeyOne was great from my short time with it). But they were way too late by then, and had to face the onslaught of Samsung / LG competition, who all had newer tech at cheaper pricing.
A BlackBerry Priv in 2011 might have saved the company, it would be competing against a "Droid Razr" and an iPhone 4S. The Priv actually arrived in 2015, and was competing against a Galaxy S6 Edge and iPhone 6S Plus. It was way too late -- people who loved their keyboards had already learned to survive with "phablet"-sized smartphones for a few years by then.
The BB OS was great, if a bit slow. The worst part of it was the terrible browser, which really didn't do it any favors, but the communications part of it was so good I could work around it. I don't care much for any mobile browsers, everything is better on a real computer, but at least Safari doesn't crawl to a stop.
I had high hopes for the QNX phones, but RIM sure didn't. But you're right, by the time they had pivoted to Android so they could take advantage of the "App market," it was too late.
Having had a BB for so many years, pawing at a screen makes me feel like the monkeys at the Monolith. I used the BB as my primary email tool, it was just that good at what it did.
I thought about that. They could have been really competitive with some of the early Droid phones, which were really what brought Android to a lot of people in the early days.
But I also remember that a lot of those companies really struggled to reach profitability with their Android phone lines. It was a hypercompetitive space with really low margins.
Maybe it would have worked if combined with their security reputation and with BBM.
He was over-ruled, and sometimes I wonder which one is more bitter about (effectively) losing their company - Jim (IIRC), who played Cassandra and was ignored, or Mike, who didn't trust him enough.
I never had good feelings about RIM/Blackberry the company. I worked at Google Waterloo with a lot of people I'd characterize as "refugees" from there. And by the time the 2010s rolled around they were clearly in a serious decline. But this movie doesn't sound like it has the finger on why.
Other people have linked to this article in the comments, but I'll call it up here into the root: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/dennis-kavelman-i-was-a-lon...
In particular I think this is insightful and worth calling out: "It was also sad to see the easy knocks against Canada from Canadian movie writers — the movie Mike is quoted as saying “I didn’t say they were the best engineers in the world, I said they were the best engineers in Canada.” Do we really need to still talk about how the University of Waterloo is one of the top universities in the world?
It sounds entertaining, but wildly wildly inaccurate. And disparaging of various humans and efforts involved. Dramatizations often are, but maybe this is just too close to home?
> “BlackBerry” is a MoneyBro movie par excellence, right up there with “Wall Street,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Boiler Room,” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.” It shares their key, defining trait: even though its main characters are either charismatic sociopaths or sheep, and the capitalist system they operate in is deeply corrupt and rewards men without morals or conscience, the story is so excitingly told, the performances so watchable, and the dialogue so quotable that it becomes the verbal equivalent of an action flick—kinetic, suspenseful, and sometimes unexpectedly beautiful and weirdly moving.
> But Glenn Howerton’s Portrayal of Jim Balsillie’s explosive rage is one of the great performances. Ever. it’s one of those instant legendary meme performances.
Totally agree. Even if you're not into the story of blackberry, the character performances and rarely onscreen story of "engineer becoming corporate" is worth the watch.
I'm not canadian but the ending was pretty sad knowing how other canadian tech companies would have similar fates in the future (like Nortel)
> Nortel’s giddy, gilded growth also made it a target. Starting in the late 1990s, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the country’s version of the CIA, became aware of “unusual traffic,” suggesting that hackers in China were stealing data and documents from Ottawa. “We went to Nortel in Ottawa, and we told the executives, ‘They’re sucking your intellectual property out,’ ” says Michel Juneau-Katsuya, who headed the agency’s Asia-Pacific unit at the time. “They didn’t do anything.”
Today, the word “phone” means always-connected handheld general purpose computer. And while *you^ may not need that, the market suggests you’re in a minority.
It's just... better. Better battery life, better typing (including blind or without looking down), better notifications with the LED, better with hardware buttons for mute/speaker/end call, better at surviving drops, and less of a headache to repair.
Less than 12 hours ago I dropped my KeyOne with enough force to make the back cover un-snap, and the phone shut down. But parts are not serialized, the back isn't fragile glass, and repairs are easy - and in this case, I just snapped the back into place.
This isn't even the best BlackBerry. I still keep my Q10 on-hand, in a drawer, sadly wishing there was a functional Matrix client for it. If there was, I'd still carry it.
Movie stars cant be in two or more places at once "promoting" their films.
Tom Cruise or any other movie star turning up for a country's premiere is not going to sway me either way, the trailers either look good or not.
Sometimes Rotten Tomatoes may also sway me.
The British press dont sway me.
Comments from strangers in the street who rave on about a film sway me more than the press do!
And this is why Netflix and Apple TV have an advantage at eating into both the Hollywood pie and a country's own terrestrial offerings like Channel 4 or BBC films. Carving out a niche in the middle which is where the money can be found especially considering the low cost of CGI.
Hollywood could do more if it embraced iMax more, for example I've yet to see the latest TopGun:Maverick film, because I want to see it at an iMax theatre for that whole AV in the thick of the action experience.
I have this Blackberry film on my list of films to see though because it looks funny, I want to see how reality has been altered and I dont think some of the tech companies get enough Hollywood treatment considering how pivotal they are or have been in our lives. Tetris is another on my list to see.
Le Man's 66, and Joy are other examples of pivotal things in our lives, even if some of us dont shop on QVC, they still fill in that gap of how did these things come to be, even if not historically 100% accurate, its the sort of history lesson no one else is giving to the masses.
Most history taught at school is just battles and wars, its like the state has an obsession with fighting, so to have Hollywood give us some history is refreshing and I encourage them to do more please.
Now days, most big budget/big studio films are released simultaneously in major markets around the world. For example, Barbie and Oppenheimer were released on the same day in most of the major markets.
But smaller independent releases like this typically aren't, because different companies often bid on the distribution rights separately for different markets. In this case, it was released in Canada by Elevation Pictures, in the USA by IFC Films, and internationally by Paramount.
In the UK & Ireland it will be released (exclusively in cinemas) on October 6th, and looks like it will get fairly wide distribution.
The classic Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burned.
I absolutely want to give the filmmakers money now to see it. Why do they do this to themselves? Sell it to me. Take the money out of my hand. I am giving it to you.
The filmmakers release it in their local market first, usually the U.S. is the biggest market. If the film does well and an UK distributor has the confidence that it's worth releasing in the UK then the filmmakers will sell the rights to the distributor to handle all the stuff I mentioned above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic...
It’s a bit silly but in a good way.