This book was absolutely amazing as I was, like most people, a blackberry user and loved the phone and always wondered how and why they completely missed the boat on smart phones. Now I know. I highly recommend this book to all !!

I read Losing The Signal last week. It suffers from being rushed out (lots of typos, for example), but it accomplishes its primary goal: after you read it, you'll have no doubts as to why RIM collapsed. They were a company that had one good idea and no idea how to follow it up. Sometimes you'll read a story and think to yourself "if only they'd done this one thing different, they would have survived." That was most definitely not the case with RIM. Their management kept doing amazingly boneheaded things, one after the next. Just one example: at a trade show where Verizon announced they would be investing massively in LTE, one of RIM's co-CEOs (Lazaridis) spent an entire meeting lecturing Verizon's management about why nobody needed 4G.

The book gets off to a slow beginning while recalling the experiences of both men while they were children. It becomes much more interesting while recalling the growth and fall of the company. I remember much of this as it unfolded, but the book fills in many details. However, the end is rushed after the two resign. The two years of Heins is given one page, at most, and the year plus of Chen is given even less. The book seems to end on an upbeat note which isn't based in reality. I would have preferred much more detail of Heins's era, and that of the current Chen.

This is was an insider view of the rise and fall of RIM, as a consumer I watched from the sidelines and this was a facinating insider reivew of history. The authors have really gotten inside what happened at this once iconic brand.