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BlackBerry Reportedly Prepping To Slash Workforce By 40 Percent
Nerval's Lobster writes "BlackBerry is preparing to slice up to 40 percent of its workforce by the end of 2013, according to anonymous sources speaking to The Wall Street Journal. The layoffs will reportedly shrink the company's overall operations and affect every department. A BlackBerry spokesperson refused to comment on the matter to the Journal. BlackBerry bet the company on the success of its new BlackBerry 10 operating system, but its first two 'hero' devices running the software — the Z10 and Q10 — failed to make much of an impact when they arrived on the market earlier this year. On Sept. 18, BlackBerry also unveiled the larger Z30, which runs an updated version of BlackBerry 10 and features a five-inch AMOLED touchscreen and larger battery. Once a dominant player in the mobile-device space, BlackBerry seemed helpless to respond as Google Android and Apple iOS slowly but surely chewed away its market-share over several quarters. As corporations adopted BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies, a flood of personal iPhones and Android devices helped displace BlackBerry as a mainstay of executives and office workers."
It seems like they're slashing their workforce every few months. How many people are left?
RIM (or Blackberry as they're known by now) rested on its laurels for far too long and let Android and iOS take over. I'm surprised they haven't just put the company up for sale and crossed their fingers someone would foolishly put in an offer.
I used to love my BlackBerry.. I bet they would have wished to have been bought by Microsoft instead.
Film at 11.
This space for rent.
Now the place is a pig sty, we're all starving, but we're on budge!
Will be seated at a table for 6 at Chilis, sucking up margaritas while lamenting how badly the BB CEOs screwed up their awesome market position by not even being able to beat Microsoft to market with a smartphone.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Amateur hour is over, bitches!!
-RIM
RIM ended up known as "lawsuits in motion" for their dependence on the government-granted monopolies we call intellectual "property." They depended on these things instead of innovating and improving their products and staying ahead of the pack. Meanwhile, iPhones and Androids kept showing up with new features, better processors, improved OSes, etc. etc.
The moral is simple, run like hell, don't look back because something might be gaining on you, and above all, don't stop to hire mercenaries to fight for you and then relax while a bunch of hired guns save your village with Elmer Bernstein's music in the background.
I hope BlackBerry manage to salvage their device business. The Q10 is the best phone I had since the N900. The multitasking is very similar, as is the integrated messaging. And the keyboard is superb. Of course, I wish it ran linux, but apart from that, it's great.
"RIM ended up known as "lawsuits in motion" for their dependence on the government-granted monopolies we call intellectual 'property.'"
This line is marked by such great stupidity that I felt compelled to reply. Blackberry was entirely hosed by a classic patent troll, NTP. You say they depended on IP rather than innovated, but can you point out how they specifically utilized IP more so than the supposed innovators. Last time I checked, Apple and Google also have patents, and happily enforce them around the world. "Please, help yourself to a fuckin' [] book, cause you're talking like a fuckin' retard." (Southpark).
Blackberry could come back as a semi successful phone manufacturer if they adopted an open platform for their hardware (i.e. Android) and build premium business apps that would be included with their phones. There simply is not enough room for another OS when so many have IOS and Android.
You are right on. Tech is about innovation, not litigation.
The moral is simple, run like hell, don't look back because something might be gaining on you, and above all, don't stop to hire mercenaries to fight for you and then relax while a bunch of hired guns save your village with Elmer Bernstein's music in the background.
P.S. Nice "moral". If I had mod points, I would be scoring you as 'funny'.
At the company I work for, we've tested iPhones, Androids and other smartphone variations, but stay on the Blackberry for now. The main reason? Security. No smartphone can touch the level of security that a Blackberry possesses, especially for companies in which the security of data is essential. The iPhone initially was allowed, but when folks found out that they were locked down and that they had to use only the software the company mandated for security reasons, the iPhones were returned and Blackberry devices issued instead.
Part of the complaints came because users can't understand that these are COMPANY devices, not personal devices. And the company has a stake in maintaining the security of the device and the data that resides on it. But people wanted to download whatever apps they wanted, a major security threat, or access whatever network they wanted (again, a security threat).
BYOD may be nice for small companies, but not major ones. Especially if the major companies want to stay major companies, device security and data security will remain essential... which is why Blackberry devices will still be around for a while.
Personally? I have a work-provided Blackberry. My personal device is a cellphone, and will remain so as long as it can.
There is a lot of hate for BlackBerry in the media, the tech blogger world, and the financial analyst world. While not all of it may be unfounded, most of it is quite excessive. If some piece of news has even a sliver of negativity, and is about BlackBerry, it will be spun as the worst thing ever for which the company should be condemned to the pits of hell. If the same news were about any other company, it might be little more than a shrugged off footnote.
Another thing you notice among a lot of this hate, is complete ignorance of BlackBerry 10 and everything the company has done over the course of the past two years. What far too many people simply do not mentally acknowledge, is that BlackBerry 10 is a completely and fundamentally different platform from the old BlackBerry OS. On a technical level, the only thing it has in common is the brand name. You often see people remembering a bad experience with some old BlackBerry OS phone, and using that to draw an invalid conclusion about what the company is currently producing.
Companies like Nortel, Sun, Word Perfect, Digital, etc have all done the multi thousand person cut with promises of trimming the fat and getting back into fighting form. But when a company has become this bloated it is because the MBAs took over the company years before. MBAs hate R&D and progress. They love to rework the old over and over, giving it new names and calling it the X initiative. So when they cut the "fat" they don't start with themselves they start with R&D and other things that are the only chances of the company surviving the experience. They are shocked when cutting 10s of millions off the payroll doesn't produce the results they are looking for; so in true MBA form they try again, and again. So what you see are these massive layoffs of 1000s at a time. If they company didn't need them then why did they hire them in the first place? Either these people were useless and the people who hired them or created those departments should be sacked first, or the people being fired are useful and thus stupid to lay off. Personally I would say to fire whomever picked QNX as the basis of the new OS. Then I would fire the people who came up with the idea of a touchscreen only BB, then I would fire whomever came up with the idea of 500 basically identical models, then I would fire whomever designed the BB App Store, then I would fire the person who came up with the BB Desktop system, but first I would fire everyone with an MBA. Fire all the MBAs and the company would be in the black in 30 days (maybe less).
With the BB 10 and its new personal mode, can your IT department cripple any aspect of the personal mode? If so then the new OS is just as crappy as the old OS. The OS is not the problem. It was that people were given "Smart" phones (and BB phones have long been quite smart) that have been lobotomized. So you have super senior managers who control billion dollar budgets not allowed to go to facebook because some IT person says NO. Well guess what those senior managers will go out and buy their own phone and leave their BB in their desk and just hand out their personal phone number; or swap in the SIM card. So how can a company expect to sell phones when executives everywhere felt that the phone was a personal insult.
There is a great story where some BB exec was at a fortune 50 company and saw all these top execs getting a free BB and just not using it. But going out and buying their own $700 phone. This exec apparently went back to RIM and told the top top people there and they said BS. This was when the RIM share price was near its peak. They didn't understand that if people were tossing a free phone into their desk that their company was in big trouble.
So if BB wants to survive they have to bite the bullet and pull the plug on IT departments being able to cripple the phones. The IT people will scream and wail but they aren't the end users. The IT people will make all kinds of empty threats but it is those top execs who get together and pick a new Phone vendor.
Over time, I also discovered that calendar items were being automatically deleted as they aged - this, without any warning or prior information. Looking up past business meetings which had disappeared was pretty frightening.
The BlackBerry World App Store has never worked properly. Rather than a one-click install, most apps crash during install while leaving partial files in the system.
The 9700 routinely locks up due to lack of space - but there is never a warning or option to move software and data onto the MicroSD card (for example).
All of the above is extremely frustrating to the point where I don't want to continue (let alone upgrade) with the brand but I just love the keyboard.
*** Don't be dull.***
And this pattern is the problem...
You raise the question of whether something on the "new platform" is done the same way as on the "old platform"
You then assert that this is the case, enabling a whole rant about how this is horrible, and therefore the company that made these products shall be destroyed in the most gruesome way possible.
At no point in this are you actually showing evidence of actually knowing how the "new platform" does anything. Rather, you're jumping to whatever conclusions enable maximum negative ranting.
You seem knowledgeable on the subject. Could you point me to some article that discusses specific what advantages BB10 has over the latest Android variants from the end user's perspective? I would be interested in giving it a shot, but as it stands, I am so satisfied with Android--in particular with the fact that I can run ROMs of the latest versions of the OS on a three-year-old phone--that I am somewhat weary of giving the competition a shot. It's not a rhetorical question. I would genuinely like to know.
It was a rhetorical question. I know the answer. The answer is not good. It shows that they haven't learned a thing. The OS could be 8 times faster 5 times easier to program, and be twice as easy to use but still be a complete dud because they haven't fixed the fundamentals. I didn't even go into their huge quality control issues.
I wonder what is going to happen to the 28 RIM buildings in waterloo region. Hopefully traffic will be better during rush hour. Still plenty of big tech companies in the region like opentext, google, desire2learn, com dev international, christie digital, toyota, and a few others.