At the time the company barely advertised because it was certain that its reputation in businesses ensured that people would come to it.
The story - which is told through quotations from people who worked with and around the company - shows that the meteoric rise of the company came through the fact that in around 2003, owning one marked you out: "BlackBerry was a darling of enterprise. If you had a BlackBerry you were an important person, as at that time a lot of people didn’t have a smartphone. It was almost a status symbol within the company," the article quotes Kevin Michaluk, founder of CrackBerry.com. " It was the most intuitive communication device. With that blinking red light, it had that addictive quality."
It also made the crossover into consumer popularity in 2004, when the company began handing handsets out to Bollywood celebrities, and the 2006 BlackBerry Pearl appeared with a trackwheel and a camera - the latter being an addition that the company had previously eschewed.
But the problems began to multiply as the iPhone and then Android phones forced the company to try to catch up.
