Apple and Google clobbered BlackBerry despite Research in Motion’s head start.

Evidence

As so often happens in tech industries, Research in Motion started the game but did not master it. That job would be left to the world’s two mightiest computing empires, which by the 2010s had clued in to the potential for far broader adoption of what the BlackBerry represented. With their nearly unlimited reserves of engineering and design talent, Apple and Google would go on to create iPhones and Androids, respectively, and thoroughly clobber the Canadians at their own game, offering a much more appealing user interface. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1039

Categorization

• XREF: A classic first-mover-doesn’t-master narrative echoing the earlier history of other attention merchants in this book.