There have been books written about BlackBerry – notably, Losing the Signal, by journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff – but there has been no book that deals specifically with the wider tech ecosystem that surrounds BlackBerry and gave it rise – about the Waterloo Region tech community.
Until now.
Chuck Howitt’s new book is called BlackBerry Town – How high tech success has played out for Canada’s Kitchener-Waterloo.
The book, published by Toronto’s Lorimer Press and due to appear on store shelves (DATE NEEDED), is a needed compendium of the emergence of Waterloo Region as a tech powerhouse, written with a journalist’s knack for narrative and storytelling.
BlackBerry Town deftly describes the planting of the seeds that led to the emergence of not only BlackBerry, but global software giant OpenText, and the follow-on wave of tech companies like Kik, Sandvine, D2L, and the recent growth of companies North, Vidyard, SSimwave, Miovision and the like.
It ably describes the people behind the creation of the University of Waterloo and its computer and co-op programs, how Electrohome morphed into Christie Digital, the helper role played by Communitech – connecting the dots that created the ecosystem at play today.
Howitt, now retired, was a longtime reporter and editor at the Waterloo Region Record who helped cover the rise of BlackBerry as a tech powerhouse and its eventual fall from grace.
He uses his front-row vantage point to take readers inside the tug of war that unfolded between the Waterloo Region Record and BlackBerry (nee RIM) as the smartphone maker began its spiral from dominance and the newspaper worked to report the facts without fear or favour.
Howitt recently sat down with Communitech News and talked about his new book, why he embarked on the project and what he learned about the region’s tech community along the way.
Q – First of all, congratulations on the book. Tell us how it emerged and why you decided it was a tale that needed telling.
A – The book was six years in the making. I began it in the fall of 2013 after I retired. I’d always wanted to write a book, ever since I went into journalism. As I started covering BlackBerry, I thought, there’s a book here. I got so fixated on RIM, I felt I had to do that story. You can’t talk about the local tech sector without talking about RIM. I felt like it almost picked me.
So I just went at it kind of gradually, slowly.
Then Losing the Signal then came out in 2015. I read it and I thought I needed a new approach. So I decided to do it in a memoir format, my experience covering BlackBerry. An acquaintance at Wilfrid Laurier Press took it to Jim Lorimer at Lorimer Press and he had this vision I didn’t see. I was focused on RIM and he said, no, there was a bigger story there.
I was reluctant at first. But Jim was the one who pressed me, who said you’ve got to take the broader perspective. I owe a lot to Jim Lorimer.
Q – Were there any surprises once you got into it?
A – OpenText was a surprise. I was interviewing (former OpenText CEO) Tom Jenkins, asking him background questions, and he said there was a book about OpenText that had been written, so he sent it to me.
It was a mind-blower. I plucked a lot of stories from it. OpenText was definitely an eye-opener.
And Gerald Hagey (the founding president of University of Waterloo) was a surprise – the amount of work he did in the creation of UW. That story came from (local historian) Ken McLaughlin and his books. I owe a lot to Ken’s work.
Another surprise – and I guess it shouldn’t be – were the people I found by accident, people like TextNow COO Lindsay Gibson, who worked at BlackBerry. She’s a friend of my daughter. I had asked her to read my original manuscript and she connected me to other former BlackBerry people and played a role herself in the final version.
Q – A thread that remains constant throughout the book, and the evolution of the local tech ecosystem, is University of Waterloo and the impact of its computer department and co-op program. It would be difficult to imagine events unfolding here the way they did if not for its role, no?
A – Right from the beginning, I kept reading about Wes Graham (the first director of the UW’s computing centre). I knew I wanted to focus on him. He didn’t do it alone, but he was kinda the guy who led a lot of the innovation.
UW has always been a leader in computer science. Wes came from IBM, he was really innovative, he got the best equipment and was very visionary. He got the really good students, the best equipment, and then they just went at it.
And the co-op, absolutely, was key. Co-op existed before, in the States, but nobody did it bigger or better than Waterloo.
Q – It’s impossible to tell the region’s tech story without talking about RIM (now BlackBerry) and its co-CEO and co-founder Mike Lazaridis. His contributions to the region continue to this day, as you point out, with his philanthropic work and his push to develop quantum computing. What’s your take on Mike?
A – As I said near the end of the book, a lot of people sort of blame Mike for RIM’s failure in the smartphone business, that he dropped the ball. But as I said, the guy is not superhuman. It was a team effort for why things went wrong. I think we’re expecting too much from him.
He accomplished a great deal and I think he’s on to a good thing with quantum computing. And good on him for doing it. There’s a lot of potential there.
I think quantum is a bit of a redemption story. He would never admit it. But I think it’s given him motivation to carry on.
And I don’t think there will be any one winner in quantum. There will be a bunch of winners. It’s not a winner-take-all. I think Waterloo will be a player in the quantum field because of Mike.
Q – You didn’t shy away from describing the difficult decisions faced by the Waterloo Region Record as RIM began to chafe at its reporting – eventually even refusing to speak to the Record’s main tech reporter, Matt Walcoff. The Record, as you describe, didn’t go public with RIM’s attempt to influence its coverage and found ways to get around the freezing-out of Walcoff. Can you describe what that period was like?
A – I dedicated the book to Matt Walcoff. RIM was bit like a small-town bully. It expected the Record to just follow its orders and be a cheerleader. We couldn’t do that. That’s not the job of a newspaper.
Matt did some good stories. He worked hard. He was a great reporter. [And] he ended up getting penalized for it.
We didn’t want to get in a war with RIM.
Q – What conclusions did you draw about the region’s tech community?
A – I would say you don’t build an ecosystem overnight. It’s built over time. And really, I think it started with UW; Laurier plays a role, but a complementary one.
I was struck by how versatile and diverse the Waterloo tech sector is. Everybody thought when RIM was going down that it would be a serious blow for the tech sector. The sector seems to have rebounded, so it’s very diverse. And BlackBerry seeded other tech companies.
BlackBerry’s fall was a bit of a blow in that the marquee company that everybody recognized globally is gone and hasn’t been replaced. RIM was like the Beatles. You don’t replace the Beatles.
[But today] you’ve got some good, solid companies. So the ecosystem is built on a firm foundation rather than on one company dominating [the region].
There are certain key ingredients. The university. The culture of entrepreneurship. There’s the university’s IP policy, where the entrepreneur can retain ownership of their ideas. The tradition of excellence, of trying to achieve above your comfort zone. So you’ve got that history and tradition, and it built from there.
When you look at the new companies coming up, I think when you look at a lot of the people leading these companies, a lot of them are from outside the area who were attracted to this area because of what has happened here.
It’s testimony, I think, to the work others have done and the community of companies that has been built here.
– Interview edited for brevity and clarity.
