Soon after he joined RIM, Balsillie made a tactical mistake that he's never forgotten. He was closing on a deal with Oracle, he got ambitious, and it all fell apart. "The agreement was to have them license our software and build it into Oracle to get wireless access to databases. Oracle was a big partner, and they wanted to work with us on this. But I got stubborn on a couple of clauses in the contract, figuring I'd play businessman. Surprise, surprise -- Oracle walked. And basically, they disappeared from the sector for four or five years.

"Since then, Oracle has come back," Balsillie continues. "They love the product, and we get along great. But for a while, we lost a good ally. I learned that you don't win by trying to hit a grand slam to Mars. You win by making constant progress."

Balsillie recalled that lesson as he watched BlackBerry take off. He knew that with the device's success, RIM was at a turning point. "We had to shift from competing with the companies that felt threatened by us to partnering with them," he says. "We couldn't let them feel as if we were trying to control the game." RIM has launched a slew of partnership deals with an array of software and communications providers, from America Online to BT Cellnet to Nortel Networks to Yahoo.

Still, the BlackBerry faces major-league competition. Both Motorola and Palm have more visibility than RIM in the consumer market -- and both make devices with similar features. Handset makers Ericsson and Nokia are rushing headlong into the wireless-data space. But Balsillie, who argues that packet data is BlackBerry's turf, likes RIM's chances.

"Who wins between an alligator and a bear?" he asks rhetorically. "It all depends on the terrain -- do they fight on water, land, or mud? So it goes with wireless. All the carriers want to get into data, and packet data is our terrain. I would submit that it's far more straightforward to put voice into a data appliance such as the BlackBerry than it is to put data and data infrastructure into a voice appliance. So packet data, which used to be the irrelevant sector, is now the principal grounds of contention. And we've already installed the software base, we're building our eighth generation of applications and the sixth generation of packet radio, and we've got our software behind the firewalls of 7,000 companies."

Balsillie and Lazaridis practically glowed with confidence as they talked about their company's future over a steak dinner. You couldn't help but contrast their optimism with all of the doom and gloom in the technology sector. But to their way of thinking, they've done the hard work of building an incredibly complex service and staking out their place in a market that is getting bigger faster. "The market for wireless data is 400 times larger than it was five years ago, and we've been there from the start," says Balsillie. "How could we not be confident?"

Bill Breen (bbreen@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor. Learn more about RIM on the Web (www.rim.net).

Sidebar: These Stars Are All Thumbs

Who would have imagined that a crew of supersober Canadian engineers would have produced an email device that's so compelling, it's become a lifestyle accessory in the highest circles of power and glamour? Intel chairman Andy Grove has joked that the BlackBerry is so addictive, "It should be reported to the DEA." Internet poster boy Marc Andreessen, a huge BlackBerry fan, has banned the device from meetings at his new company, because too many people type rather than listen. Then there are the beautiful people, including Howard Stern and Matt Damon, as well as Jennifer Lopez and Pamela Anderson, neither of whom is best known for her thumbs. Other power users include former U.S. vice president Al Gore and venture-capital superstar Roger McNamee.