The life, death, and rebirth of BlackBerry’s hometown

"Waterloo was never the most obvious tech hub... That changed in 1984, when Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregan, two engineering students at the University of Waterloo, started a company to develop a wireless data transmission device."

The author didn't do enough research about waterloo. It was an obvious tech hub way back in the 50s, from the moment UW added an engineering faculty. It was cemented as the place for Canadian computer science when math was made it's own faculty and the fledgling school had one of the only computers in the whole country.

While RIM is the best known, it was hardly the first successful startup fostered straight out of UW. It has always churned out startups and spin off companies, long before startup culture was a thing. Engineering professors and students had long been encouraged to take leave to develop commercial products well before the founding of RIM.

The article also skims over a huge reason Waterloo region didn't slide into depression when RIM faltered: it was the icing on the economic cake, not the main batter. The universities remained strong, as did the true economic base, the insurance giants. Lots of companies, some new players and other established tech giants, have scrambled to add new icing but the basic makeup of the region has hardly changed.

"Compared to Silicon Valley, Canada’s technology industry has always been low-key and workmanlike. There aren’t any Ubers here, companies that transform entire industries in highly obvious ways. Instead, the start-up landscape is dotted with companies that have dull but necessary functions."

It's not quite Silicon Valley, but Montreal's (and Toronto's) start-up scene is anything but dull.