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RIM Manufacturing Partner Pulls the Plug On BlackBerry Phones
zacharye writes "Toronto-based original device manufacturer Celestica on Monday announced that it will stop producing hardware for struggling mobile device vendor Research In Motion. Celestica stated that it will wind down manufacturing services related to BlackBerry devices over the next three to six months, and it expects restructuring charges to be less than $35 million."
From this Chicago Tribune article, it sounds like there were 4 major manufacturers and now there will be 3. Celestica apparently made the Blackberry Bold & Curve models, and the article seems to indicate that those models will be moved over to one of the other manufacturers.
Truth be told, it was MS who killed RIM. ActiveSync, the mobile syncing software used in Exchange and several other commercial mail servers, made BES unnecessary for a lot of companies. I know at my company only devices with ActiveSync support are used. We shut down our BES over a year ago and were glad to see it go.
RIM should have had ActiveSync on BB devices as soon as it started to be popular, instead they kept wanting that BES licensing money and it led to their own demise.
This headline is designed to give the impression that Celestica is dropping RIM rather then the other way around. This is about RIM moving manufacturing from one plant to another because it makes business sense and has implications with regard to the continued viability of the business model.
When will the American media stop bashing Canadian companies into the ground. RIM is sitting on a billion in cash and has no debt. Yes there sales and marketshare are slipping but you'd think that the company was about to go under any minute the way it's reported in the media. The fact is activesync may be good enough for consumers... It isn't good enough for all use cases and the primary use case for the blackberry is corporate/government communications where security, and archival communications logs are important. These are areas where android/iphone/winphone/facephone??? can't even make the grade for inclusion for an RFP let alone proceed to an RFQ stage. As for BEZ licensing... get a better carrier or better procurement team. We haven't paid for a BEZ license directly in a while. The carrier supplies it with the unlimited data plan.