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RIM Firing (Nearly) Everybody
itwbennett writes "Research in Motion (RIM) reported grim Q4 results Thursday and announced sweeping personnel changes. Leading the parade of departing execs is Jim Balsillie, former co-CEO of the company, who has given up his board seat. David Yach, who has been CTO of software for the company for 13 years, is retiring. And Jim Rowan, chief operating officer of global operations, who has been with the company for four years, is leaving to pursue other interests."
either you innovate or you are out of business really soon
and the first ones to bail are the Captain and ship mates.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
This plane is going into a nose dive!
Now the question is who will buy the brand, patents and customers.
The title of this story is misleading.
There is nothing about firing in the source article.
An enormous number of Blackberry zero-day exploits have been seen in the wild, with a metasploit framework scheduled to be released next week. CIOs shit bricks.
http://crackberry.com/rim%E2%80%99s-q4-weak-results-and-outlook-and-brutally-honest-ceo-commentary
Looks like Thorsten is actually being the CEO now. Might get worse before it get's better. I have faith (mostly because not much else is left)!
K Man
The entire company is riding on it. They're just treading water till it comes out.
I got issued a Blackberry Bold for work yesterday and so far I've been incredibly impressed and actually like it more than my Android phone. It's something I never thought I'd get into but the physical format and the UI made pretty good sense to me (unlike android which feels disorganized/non-intuitive in a few places).
Where I think RIM has really failed is in regards to creating a culture around their devices outside of the workplace. Android has geeks and counterculture, Apple has the hipsters...and well everyone else. When I think of people with Blackberries I think of corporate culture and suit and ties - what young consumer wants to be a part of that?
Anywho - for my own selfish reasons I hope they continue (at least from my first impression) making quality devices and figure out how to market themselves outside of the enterprise.
RIM's failure is attributable, in no small part, to flat-out engineering laziness. For example, I recall their networking APIs made developers responsible for figuring out which transport mechanism (e.g., cellular, wi-fi) was available when they wanted a HTTP connection. That's nonsense. The developer just wants a connection. Irritants like these were systemic, and these make developing quality software nearly impossible. Granted, users don't see that part, but they do experience it indirectly as programmers are forced to reinvent solutions to simple tasks that ought to be high level abstractions.
I've heard of rats deserting a sinking ship but this is the first time I've heard of them being *cast overboard* as well!
I had a co-worker who left a great position at a good company to go work for RIM about a year ago. Everybody told him he was nuts. I get the feeling he's regretting that decision right about now.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Having only recently gotten into the smartphone game (July 2011), I didn't really know anything about the industry back when RIM/Blackberry was king.
But now, having read some about it... wow, what a waste. They basically had huge, fat, margins, essentially no competition in the smartphone arena, for almost five years - and freaking sat on it and did almost nothing. Meanwhile Apple and Google were in the lab inventing the future. Unbelievable.
Like most Canadians the story concerns me because what does it say about the country? I sometimes wonder - even if RIM had had a clue and tried to come up with something iPhone- or Android-like, could they have done it without the California engineer and developer community? They had the money, but could they have enticed the brilliant graduates of top American schools to move to Ontario? And I don't mean to say that Canadian engineers aren't good, but that Apple and Google have access to a global talent pool - did/does RIM? (Fascinating question: How much does snow and ice have to do with the fortunes of a mobile phone developer?)
It's a sad but interesting story all around. I hope they can turn things around but I don't see much chance of it at this point.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
ITSS: It's the software stupid.
Blackberry got to where it was on the strength of its hardware. Problem is the iPhone changed the game and now the software is as important as the hardware.
The blackberry web browser was inferior until rather recently. Developing apps for a BB was a mess compared to the iPhone, the playbook couldn't even read emails until the latest update.
RIM can easily survive: Apple was in worse shape for far longer than RIM and still made a come back. However they need their own Steve Jobs who can refocus the company and develop a product that is a unique proposition, just like Apple developed, in rapid sequence the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.
It was clear that RIM doesn't go well after Halliburton ditched BlackBerries for iOS.
From my point of view, I won't miss them at all.
I have to say that this device is my favourite phone. I much prefer it to the iphone and android. I got fat fingers when using the iphone it took me 10 minutes to reply to an email. And for bothe iphone and blackberry I had to actually open email etc to see if I had any.
Who wants a RIM job anyway?
you're finally getting a well deserved vacation for all the hard work you put in the last 15 years
Wow, I am still getting calls from recruiters in Toronto offering "incredible opportunities" at RIM . We live in a strange world.
I figure by now, if you're still working for RIM, you're boned.
The time to leave was 3 years ago, and not when the big boys are lined up at the hatches with golden parachutes strapped to their backs.
(All I can say is, I'm damned glad I turned down an offer from RIM two years back as an email admin... a part of me always regretted that a little. Not anymore. Now if only I can get my employer to dump this crappy little BB Curve and get me a real phone...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Maemo is toast, Symbian poofed. Not RIM is going. Wall St and cell carriers did this.
It's like the ocean now only has two species of coral. Android and iOS make up the entire eco-system.
What fun is that?
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I remember when slashdot used to cover tech stories before news outlets and definitely before I saw it on the evening news. Now slashdot is covering stuff after it's aired on the evening news, sometimes with a delay of days, and covering it badly with sensationalist titles I'd expect from Fox! It's been dying slowly, discussions becoming more Us and Them and science fanboi yelling with little thought out argument or logic. The tide has turned and in the future this year will probably be seen as when the demise of Slashdot occured. :(
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
While Google provided tons of resources to Android developer, and Apple doing more or less the same for their developers, RIM kept the good stuff for themselves, and developers had to struggle to build Blackberry apps. You go go Google IO in 2010, you pay $300 and get two free devices. You go to a Blackberry conference in the same year at the same location, you pay $2000 and you get no device. So why am I not surprised that there's so few apps for blackberry, and RIM is struggling?
no, I don't have a sig
They have announced their culture - business. That's where they're going to concentrate. It's a good place to be if they can solidify and expand their niche.
IBM is a good example of a company that remade itself. It was heading down the tubes and changed its focus to the business market. It works well and, for RIM, it's a much better idea than trying to compete in the consumer smart phone market.
either you patent somone elses innovations or you are out of business really soon
But guys, who is going to make our tools (not toys) now?
Oh, that's right. Everyone else is making tools that are also toys. My bad.
...that 8 years ago RIM was the de-facto smart phone maker making blackberries and such, qwerty little things that had a web browser, texting, enterprise email and the like... They haven't changed their OS much in the last 10 years and still make qwerty little things (they tried a few touch screens without much success). They were still considered king in the enterprise until a few years ago. Now iOS is king with Android in a close 2nd. I'm actually a little surprised they lasted this long. Their "playbook" tablet was one of the worst selling tablets in history by a large corporation and promised to run Android apps on launch, it wasn't until a year later that it supported them. So while its sad that RIM, inventors of the smart phone, are going out of business I can't really say I didn't see this one coming.
To the cadre of senior execs who ran their company into the ground, walked away from the smoking hole with millions and millions of dollars leaving the workforce 'free to pursue other options!"
This reminds me of Yahoo: they're listening too much to the pundits, looking too much at trends, and not doing what is known to succeed, which is figuring out what you do right that people like to buy and getting better at it.
I am sorry to see this happen to RIM, but their competition did just up the ante with Android. I still like a lot of the Blackberry features better and often feel their hardware and software is better engineered, but a generation or so behind. Sometimes that's the price you pay for stability but sometimes it's a liability.
Hey - want a RIM job?
I grant it's got a certain ring to it, but probably not worth shifting country.
All with golden parachutes, I'm sure. Rats leaving the sinking ship, and taking as much cheese with them as they can haul.
like getting off the ship before it totally sinks. I wonder how much cash these big wigs are taking with them.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
gotta use the golden parachute before the company goes bankrupt
When is the last time you saw an actual photocopier and not a multipurpose copier/printer/scanner/etc.? That's roughly the same problem with Blackberry phones.
I don't know that RIM really had the products to hold up to scrutiny, if they DID try to create a culture around their devices outside the workplace. Several of my friends bought Blackerry phones in the last year or two, to use as their personal cellphones. In each case, it was a matter of "trying something new" after an existing phone or smartphone broke, got lost, or just wasn't meeting their expectations. I only know ONE person who kept using one of them after the first few months and said anything good about it. Everyone else gave them an honest try, but found too many things lacking.
I agree that the UI is "cleaner" and more consistent than the typical Android phone -- but it also lacks a lot of flexibility. One of the parts I personally disliked was the inability to configure some of the mail settings without the cellular provider enabling the functionality first on their side. I do support for a couple law offices where the Blackberry is the standard issue phone for the partners, and every time one of them needs a replacement phone, it seems like we go through a hassle with Verizon to re-provision the phone properly so the cloud-hosted Exchange mail server they use can be set up in it.
The "Blackberry Desktop" software has progressively gotten worse too! The last time I set up their current version for an employee at work here, we discovered it no longer allowed doing a "desktop sync" of email from his copy of Outlook running on his PC to the phone.
The problem for RIM was the critical window was one year after the iPhone launch. They had one year to ditch the albatross of the current platform that is developer hostile and figure out some modern approach.
Microsoft also missed that window but with the resources they have and a generally diabolical nature may yet be able to come back in...
It would have taken a lot of vision to make significant changes back at that point, but it was the only real shot they had.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In the game of phones, you win or you die.
They should have to return all the Money they made the last 3 years to the stock holders. Otherwise, it is nothing but rewarding failure yet again. Yay so called capitalism.
"Jim Rowan, chief operating officer of global operations... is leaving to pursue other interests."
Interests include candle-lit dinners, long walks on the beach, and working for a company that isn't circling the drain.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Mod up! I was going to make this exact same comment. A old-fashioned copy machine maker - instead of a modern multi-function network device - would be out of business.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
They should watch out for disgruntled employees. Fortunately a .22 isn't quite as dangerous during a spree.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
It's not a phone form factor. It didn't even have GSM or GRPS and required wifi or usb to connect to the internet. It wasn't the first wifi tablet, either. The first Maemo based device which even has the ability to function without being near wifi is the N900, released in 2009, 2 years after the first iphone went on sale.
1) 77 Million customers worldwide.
2) Blackberry brand name.
3) Number one in secure enterprise communication.
4) Patents worth at least $10 a share.
5) Over $1.3B cash.
6) Zero debt.
7) Canadian company.
8.) CNBC bashing.
So let us give the new CEO just one quarter to turn things around.....
Twitter: @dainsanefh
Really, no basis at all in reality.
The editor who posted this should DIAF.
while Microsoft, with less than 10% market share and holding, has spent billions in business deals and is spending around a half a billion just in marketing their smartphone OS. It seems strange but it says lots about how important the phone segment is to Microsoft and how even 20% isn't enough to sustain a company like RIM.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
It's like in the '70-'80 when all the world jumped on the quartz bandwagon, and most swiss mechanical clock manufacturers refused to do so... Most died, the remaining created the swatch company and started making quartz watches, no one ever learns
It's all getting too intertwined these days. You can't have a solid tablet offering without a matching mobile offering, because developers want to target both form factors with minimal hassle. And you need a solid tablet offering to get back that part of your customer base that threw away their netbook and bought an iPad, which is growing with every day.
My boss uses a Blackberry. We're a Novell shop and use eDirectory and Groupwise... and there is some kind of integration with the BB. On the other side, the iPhone clients for Groupwise are very expensive and don't offer basic features like push notifications.
I guess both remaining Crackberry users are disappointed by this news.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I don't follow. BlackBerry basically invented the smartphone, they had apps many many years before Apple had a platform (and obviously before Apple realized that Apps were something users wanted and fixed that massive oversight.)
BlackBerry has always been a multi-purpose tool. What on earth are you talking about?
Required reading for internet skeptics
He more or less saying it is like a scanner/printer vs a scanner/printer/copier. It has what you need, but when you need to make a copy, you have to scan and then print.
Large format. But then HP comes out with the Officejet 7500A and *poof* that argument is shot to hell.
1) iPhone has no native way to alert you that you missed a call without physically picking up the phone and checking the notifications. Blackberry (and some android phones) have external LEDs to indicate missed calls/texts/emails/etc.
2) Blackberry phones will go for multiple days on a single charge. iPhone needs charging at least once a day with normal use. My mom is a midwife and may be away from home for 30hrs straight. Her work replaced her blackberry with an iphone and now she needs to have a charger in the car, at home, and at work otherwise the phone will die.
Whats with all this photocopier talk. are you people still using paper?
This may be a bit off topic but I'm feelin a little ranty.
I look back at early 2010 and I recall that RIM was still selling their wares and convincing people that the BES model made sense. As other's have posted - definitely made sense when smart phones weren't sporting the "power" of fully functioning "computers" yet.
What I recall is that the iphone wasn't really competing with BB because the guys I saw with BB phones were the ones that had it "assigned" to them - most of them didn't ask for a smart phone or even know what they needed it for. They had a laptop and VPN access if they needed to get their email anyway. It was really just seen as a real-time email delivery device. Conversely the iphone users were definitely not getting the phone primarily as an email delivery device.
Then the Android phones start coming out and they basically do everything that the iphone can do without the appstore/market quite there yet. But you had a superior email experience, web browsing experience, a built in standard turn by turn GPS (which is always underrated), contact sync, etc. at a lower cost than an iphone. So it became less about what you needed a smartphone for and more about why would wouldn't choose a smartphone over a feature phone the next time the budget cycle comes around. Why as an administrator would I choose to "carry" the BES server and all that (what I consider to be "legacy") crap. When I could just suggest that people go with an apple or google phone.
I'd be furious about this whole thing if I was a RIM stockholder or board member. They had name synonymous with smart phone and they wasted it by not innovating. Don't even get me started on Microsoft and their phones. I really do see the two companies as being different but the same here.
That would help. Quick, name a BB that you crave? Did you? Thought not. If you did, can I interest you in a range of fancy 1970s Brooks Brothers ties?
"Windows Mobile should have been RIM's wake-up call"
Running the risk of sounding like a troll... no wonder they never heard it ;) .... Oh yes mr. Elop!, I'm talking about you.
They had to do this before, years ago, maybe they can take a hint from SEGA that shifted their core business to SW and apart from their handset they can release their BB as a software platform across all smart phones. Maybe not all is lost and they can do something decent unlike a certain CEO of a well known but lately ill-fortuned company that butchered a promising battle horse for a freaking pony with a "nice" saddle
I see lots of dedicated HP LaserJet4 and Laserjet P2205s. Know why? Because theyre about a thousand times more reliable than those crappy MFC devices that are slow, suck and fail all the time.
Its a pretty good parallel, actually.
You're comparing $600 laser printers to cheap $80 inkjets. I was thinking of large office copiers that do duplexing and stapling at over 55 pages per minute and are rated for millions of copies in addition to any MFD/MFC abilities.
BlackBerry has always been a multi-purpose tool that did everything poorly except email, and even that is done poorly these day. What on earth are you talking about?
FTFY. Again.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The problem for RIM was the critical window was one year after the iPhone launch. They had one year to ditch the albatross of the current platform that is developer hostile and figure out some modern approach.
That's stupid. They were the market leader until 2011, with a massive lead on iOS. They had a lot more time than you seem to think. Of course, even then they were already well in to the transition to their new platform, so I don't know where you get these ridiculous ideas from.
They're still not out of the game. They have no debt, they're still growing, and they're still pulling in billions in profits. They have a fantastic new platform that gives them a strong technical edge. They've also been innovating heavily and have several products and features that are WELL ahead of the competition (Fusion and Balance come immediately to mind).
Their new QNX-based platform is amazing, btw. Check it out.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Didn't Apple almost go under until Steve Jobs returned with his Unix Operating system and breathed life into dying Apple.
Maybe QNX (Unix like) might do the same for Blackberry.
I don't know why everyone is always ragging on blackberry. Mine works just great! In fact, I am typing this on my blackberry at the mom[NO CARRIER]
You will love pulling the battery several times a day, the excess heat given off for no reason, and the incredibly slow UI as it gets used more and more. Welcome to the team!
Yeah, battery life was horrible compared to .. oh, wait, that was the best.
Well, call quality must have suc ... oh, it was one of the best? Damn.
But their web browser .. oh, they have one of the best on the market? Shit.
Surely their management tools like Fusion suck -- oh, they're actually the capable products on the market?
What about editing documents on the go? oh, they do that better than just about everyone else?
I'll bet their clock app sucks! oh, it actually handles leap years and dst correctly, unlike some of the bigger players?
You're going to have to be more specific.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I have both for work, and I use either one of the other depending on what I want to do.
I find I don't put my life in danger when I want to call someone on my BB because I have so many favorites/hotkeys/one touch/whatever you call it - it's super easy. I hold down K and it calls Kate. I hold down M and it calls Mom. When trying to use the iPhone to call people while driving, my attention would have to be on the phone for several moments and that's dumb. I also like typing on my BB much better. But the touch screen and trackpad on BB suck... I like their older models better to be honest.
IPhones are way better for browsing, reading (including emails), and playing around. And iPhone zoom functions work great for emails and attachments. And attachment compatibility is way better on iPhone. I hate typing on them still... never as fast or accurate as a keyboard.
Also my life went to crap for days for having to patch a ton of email servers due to some odd iPhone bug while our blackberries never had a problem. BB wins on that front.
So if somebody can combine the two for real, give it to me. Until then I have to have both anyway, so I use one when calling and the other when playing around. Either is good enough for email for me. It just sucks having to lug around 2 heavy phones.
A few years ago RM management sided with oppressive governments instead of customers.
Customers stopped buying their products.
Cause and effect.
Why thank you. ;)
So far no problems but not holding my breath. I've heard similar experiences with other models and can only hope I don't get to join that club. The model is a 9930 if that makes any difference.
One thing worth noting - all the problems you mention I'm having with my current android. (Samsung Intercept)
Keep humping that chicken.
is what i did to gf back when
There was a time that buggy whip manufacturers had a lead on their competitors, even after their fate had been sealed. The trend has been for Apple and Android to take their market share for a few years.
I remember a point where Apple and RIM were both claiming the lead of the smartphone market. It was at that point that it became clear that RIM had lost. Momentum is quite the force. Apple and Android slung-shot past RIM at that point, and the only outcome was RIM losing.