RIM: fell to Apple marketing and Samsung sleek fragility. Their last phone introduced features google and Apple are still creeping out some 15 years on.

Nortel: Fell to Harper's desire to make Canada a US colony as well as the CPC bot doing anything to stop the CCP from stealing everything the company had. In particular, Nortel developed 5G tech that China then "premiered"

Nortel moved to North Carolina then slowly went to shit.

RIM could not get their shit together to develop an OS to support apps. Then went to shit and now makes software for refrigerators.

Seriously there was once a plethora of sats available and it seems like the whole approach dried up.

As with most of our successful industries, they don't get any grease since they always seem to be working properly and cheerfully printing out money. Meanwhile we're busy chasing all the other squealing gears in our economy instead of focusing on what currently works, and we don't feel like it needs our attention. So we let our attention drift (or be directed) elsewhere, while thieves, saboteurs and vulture capitalists around the world quietly dismantle it and part it out, leaving an empty shell that looks like it's still working but it's all an illusion projected from afar and there's nothing left inside. It's all gone. Then it collapses, and we assume it must've been a scam all along, and tell ourselves we were just deluding ourselves that we could ever actually compete on the world stage, and we tell ourselves that being the world's 10th largest economy, depending how you count, is just because we sell off all our resources and we've really got nothing else to offer the world.

And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as we are then unable to provide high-skilled jobs for our well-educated workforce, and they leave to seek jobs in the places that gutted our industries in the first place, pretending it's just the "free market". Free to knife and murder the competition, yes, that kind of free.