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RIM CEO: 'There's Nothing Wrong With the Company'

Posted by Soulskill on from the reality-distortion-field-on-the-fritz dept.

redletterdave writes "Research In Motion is in trouble. The BlackBerry maker has been suffering from an identity crisis for the last six months, which has resulted in mass layoffs, lots of job shuffling, dramatic drop-offs in market share and a quickly decaying portfolio for investors. But not according to Thorsten Heins! The newly-appointed CEO published an op-ed in the Toronto Globe and Mail on Tuesday, and also appeared on a radio program the same morning, to deliver one message: 'There's nothing wrong with the company as it exists right now.'"

3 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. Re:CEO's job is to sell... by eln · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If it's obvious to everyone that a company has problems, the worst possible thing a CEO can do is say everything is fine, because it makes everyone think he's out of touch or not interested in fixing what's wrong. A good CEO would acknowledge the problems and present a high-level plan for fixing them. Whistling past the graveyard just makes things worse.

  2. Something is wrong by hawkeey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well I think we just found one thing wrong with the company: The CEO is delusional, a liar, or both.

  3. Re:Denial by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because you believe the media's portrayal of RIM -- a company with no debt, $2 billion in assets, positive cash flow, extensive global market share in enterprise and military markets, and a newly reshuffled leadership and pared-down workforce -- as hopelessly crippled merely because they're losing market share in the US consumer market, an area where they have never been a stellar performer.

    People said the same thing about Apple not that long ago, and that demise seemed at least as imminent, if not more.

    That said, RIM has done a spectacularly bad job of marketing itself, which only fuels the fires of the doom-sayers. And the decision to delay the release of their new phones until after the gloriously profitable Christmas season because they want to make sure that the new OS integrates seamlessly with embedded systems in cars which don't yet exist has to be one of the stupidest strategic moves in modern business history, right up there with New Coke.

    But RIM's self-defeating strategic, tactical, and marketing debacles aside, the reports of its death really are quite exaggerated.