Which one of these would you most like to see?

Stephen Gillie

Blackberry were an interesting company on the technical side - they made phones, sure, and the phone OS. And then they had the Blackberry Network, which was how the phones connected with the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES), which sat next to Exchange Server, and checked a user's email every 30 seconds. Before iPhones made IMAP ubiquitous, it was the fastest mobile way to get email. Users could message each other directly using their Blackberry number on Blackberry Messenger, a precursor to iMessage. Carriers charged a $5 Blackberry Fee per phone to access the Blackberry Network. I did so many BES activations back in the day. The downfall was sad, watching them flail around to develop phones with touchscreen like a gimmick instead of the main interface. Everyone said they should have made Blackberry Messenger and BES into Android and Apple apps instead of new hardware, but instead they faded into obscurity.

Stephen Gillie

Owners often don't make money on sports teams - usually they break even and do it for the love of the sport and all the fame. The city issue is complicated, involving several groups in the city, the owner, and the league - can't have teams too close. And the brand is a license, which is why we probably won't get the Supersonics back with the same name and logo. Stadiums are bought by ISPs and companies in other unrelated industrues often because those industries aren't making much money, and it's a nice supplement to the bottom line.

A Kane

Definitely KB Toys. I used to work there so that one's personal!

Company Man

Oh wow, I never even heard of that one.

Braden Ellis

I would love to see you tackle the business side of Sports. Why do franchises rise and fall, how do they secure funding for stadiums, why do they decide which city they'll move to if they don't get their way, the power of tv deals to keep them afloat, etc

ThatYaquiGuy

Yeah they literally had a monopoly at the time my friend had Turbographix-16 which was even harder to find games for!

Company Man

Interesting. I imagine it would have been much more difficult to find Sega related stuff rather than Nintendo back then. Luckily, I always had Nintendo so never had to deal with that haha.

Company Man

It's possible. Two of the biggest cell phone makers of the past.

Company Man

Agreed. Probably mostly straight forward but plenty of good stuff to talk about on the topic.

Kevin Furr

Ha I think I know what did in BlackBerry (actually I read “Losing the Signal” about that) but it would be a fun episode.

Hmm maybe I mistook from when you did Nokia

ThatYaquiGuy

I am very biased for KB as I remember they were the only place that sold Sega master system stuff for a while in my area

Company Man

I can confidently say that I haven't.

I thought you did blackberry at some point