Nah, most of Blackberry's death should be blamed on terrible management that had everything going right for them but wouldn't evolve to meet their competitors until it was way too late. Now about six years too late Blackberry has one of the best mobile OS ever... and like >5% of the marketshare.
I used to go to Waterloo for business all the time, and before the iPhone it was all too apparent that RIM was going to fail, and fail spectacularly.
The first problem is that Waterloo is a small sleepy university town, with no real prominent industry. The last big 'tech' company out of there was Watcom who hit it big with a SQL server of all things, and was later bought out and destroyed for that alone (they did make a great C/C++ compiler too).
So being a small town, they never attracted any talent from the outside. Every time you would deal with RIM people they all came from the same schools, went to the same classes, taught by the same professors. They dressed the same, and acted the same. And they all praised the 'wisdom' of their two co-ceos. It was crazy how this monoculture would react to new things always putting them in the worst light, talking them down etc.
Apple had their ROKR, and everyone had a laugh. Why would you want a phone and mp3 player? Our phone does email with the smallest bandwidth. Everyone also did their best to shun WindowsCE as who wants an operating system with apps? And that their phone could load email from exchange through their own network faster than the MS phone could from their own internet connected server.
But time, they changed.
When the iPhone was announced, the damage control was laughable as they not only had a company line it was a toy and of no significance since it was going to 'drink' bandwidth while they gleefully sipped. And then it shipped, and I had one, unlocked it, and took it with me to Canada (it was a US only thing at the time) and when people saw it they wanted it right away, and thought that even at 2G speeds it was the coolest thing ever. Except when I went to Waterloo. I even met with phone hardware designers, and I showed it to them, saying if they don't copy this thing, they are doomed. Instead they went on how they were being forced to make something out of their field that the company didn't want to do, and that they knew the mobil market better than the consumers, and everyone would come back to them.
Their arrogance, and defying what the consumer wanted killed RIM. They only had a market at first, because they were first to market. Microsoft could have been in Apple's position but let's face it, CE was ugly as hell, restricted to Internet Explorer 4, felt like a windows device, and sat stagnated. As much as I hate windows 8 on the desk, on the phone it's quite nice, but too little too late.
Apple focused on something consumers wanted, without knowing they wanted it.
The smart thing google did, was to grab Android, and adapt it to something that was a 'good enough' metoo phone, but licensed it for free. Now if RIM had gone the Android route, with their messaging apps, and their precious keyboard maybe they would have had a chance. Instead, they had to re-invent the wheel, because monoculture dictated that they had to have their own OS, because running Linux was 'bad' as it wasn't from Waterloo so they had to buy QNX (also Canadian) and spend years trying to retool it for users and bring it to market.
Heck, even the BB tablet (I forget the name, I even have one) was a joke that it didn't have properly working apps at launch, and they charged so much for it. I bought one when the price crashed, but it barely made a useful 32gb music player for $99 CDN.
TL;DR you hit the nail there, bad management, from a small town, where everyone thinks the same, and acts the same. Nobody liked their crappy servers, and once there was a chance to defect, everyone did.
