Jim Balsillie reveals the moment he knew BlackBerry was done

On this week’s The Disruptors, hosts Amber Kanwar and Bruce Croxon talked about former co-CEO of BlackBerry, Jim Balsillie, speaking publicly for the first time on the exact moment that he knew that BlackBerry had lost to Apple.

That moment, apparently, was the creation of the Blackberry Storm. “There’s a fine line between ambition and biting off more than you can chew,” said Balsillie at The Empire Club. “With the Storm we tried to do too much: it was a touch display; it was a clickable display; it was new application and media things all done in an incredibly short period of time.”

Balsillie said that, after that, he knew that they couldn’t compete with high-end hardware anymore.

Watching the video, Kanwar said it’s just as important to focus on the “disrupted” as it is to focus on disruptors to learn lessons from other companies. Croxon, who admitted that he has a lot of respect for the company and is a “big fan of made-in-Canada,” said what BlackBerry’s problems illustrate for him today is the importance of constantly staying on top of what the next disruptive forces will bring to the market.

“You can’t sleep, and he was candidly saying look, we paused, took a wrong move and before you knew it, there you go,” Croxon said.