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BlackBerry Confirms 4,500 Job Cuts, Warns of $950 Million Loss
An anonymous reader writes "Today BlackBerry announced that it expects its quarterly net operating losses to be somewhere between $950 million and $995 million. It also confirmed earlier reports that it would be cutting 4,500 jobs, roughly 40% of its total workforce. 'The loss is mainly the result of a write-off of unsold BlackBerry phones, as well as $72 million in restructuring charges. The company said that it would discontinue two of the six phones it currently offers.' According to the press release, BlackBerry is going to 'refocus on enterprise and prosumer market.' 'The failure of the BlackBerry 10 line of phones quickly led to speculation that the company, like Palm before it, would be broken apart and perhaps gradually disappear, at best lingering as little more than a brand name.'"
Don't worry guys! Amatuer hour is over!
-RIM
Yikes! I totally didn't see that coming!!
Blackberry has been behind in the smart phone game for years now. If you are not changing, you are dying.
So the headline makes reference to a loss of 4500 RIM jobs, and that is a tragedy.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
40% of their workforce? I guess the worst part of this is that there are still ~6,750 more jobs to lose...
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
At this point its just sad... like watching your dog die.
Beware of the Leopard.
There's gonna be a lot of disappointed anal retentive types.
While on the one hand this is an example of natural evolution within the mobile industry, it's still a shame to seeing them dying. They really did bring a lot of new thinking to the industry... ten years ago. They backed themselves into this corner through sheer ignorance. They literally shunned innovation, thinking that their old platform would somehow keep things going. When they realized what dumb-asses they had been with a lack of long-term strategy, it was too late. I really do like the new BB platform, great phones and a great OS. The problem is, even people who admit that they really are pretty cool don't want to invest in a platform that everyone knows is on the verge of going six feet under. With that in mind, this really is the personification of too little to late. So that's my semi-damning eulogy.
RIP BlackBerry.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
...then I might have felt endeared to them.
As it is, however, watching a worldwide fleet of such devices go out of currency (as the company unduly continues to wait for those of us who- who once trusted it to keep our devises up-to-date - to trust it again. We didn't & won't.
When will companies begin to enable its customers to enjoy the freedom of choice, in such matters, rather than opting for a "they'll have choice but to buy the new model" last resort - rather than encourahe a lasting, trust-rewarding relationship...
Perhaps someone who still can will help those who want to... to at least turn the fleet of PlayBooks into something useful... Eg, a handy console for a wise selection of video tutorials from KhanAdamy.org.
That's our hope for RIM...
They came, they made & sold (in this case, PlayBooks), they left something of some value for a unique purpose, supporting Education... So their creation won't go to the same kind of Hell that Apple's Lisa did, long ago...
A company that can lose $1 billion USD and stay open only needs 10,000 employees.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Poor Blackberry; they've been on the skids for years. The whole "Lawsuits in Motion" thing distracted them, but mostly they missed the boat when Apple was developing the smartphone market for people who want the shiny toys and Google Android followed up by taking the cheaper smartphone space.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Wide (not wise)
And... We were referring to the rumoured but AFAIK never delivered upgrade to PlayBooks, that could have come out with the latest product releases... We think it still can & should be released, to help users retain some value in their mostly devices.
If that's impossible le, let RIM release the tools & info to enable those who can (& may still want to) attempt to do that, eg, as an Open Source project, as a tribute to the company & its device...
I bought a used Blackberry when it was still a current phone and was appalled to find it required a Blackberry account to work properly. This was just at the point when even dumbphones like the Sony W810i I was using could receive email in real time and notify the user, with nothing more than some configuration and a basic GPRS connection. Needless to say I never considered going any further and my Curve 4310 sits in a drawer for use as a spare handset just in case
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
We trust it eventually became obvious, that we were referring to PlayBook, despite that name from being clipped from the OP's title line...
And let Elop run the triad of companies: Microsoft, Nokia and Blackberry--right into the ground.
Die, die die!
Considering that BlackBerry employs 10k+ people, this is a wholly callous attitude that I'm sure grants you qualification for some CEO-ship somewhere. BlackBerry is not an single entity, but instead a ship carrying 10k people's livelihoods. Granted, those in charge may not have made the right decisions, and rested on their laurels....but this company and it's people arguably greatly furthered what was possible in your pocket, and cheering for their death for no reason other than some kind of device-zealotry, makes me sad for humans, and pity you.
Grow up.
What is a prosumer? Is this a real term or something they just made up?
It sounds like they have no idea who would buy their phones so they made up a category of people that sounds good but means nothing.
First, Blackberry waited far too long in their downward spiral before giving serious consideration to selling the company. Second, by announcing to the world that they're for sale they instantly froze the decision process of every corporation that was considering an upgrade to BB10. Why would any customer consider committing themselves to Blackberry for the next 2-5 years when they're not even sure Blackberry would last in (its current form at least) till the end of the year? It's clear Blackberry publicly announced their intentions to sell in order to stem the mass exodus out of the stock. It will go down as the last of many horrible decisions made by the company's management.
You're giving Blackberry too much credit here...a company of thousands doesn't get "distracted"...the decision makers may be completely out of touch with their market or now technology works...that sure is possible...but a company can't get "distracted" any more than it can "take a shit"
You talk about Apple as if the iphone is all just bullshit eye candy...
the iphone was better in practically every way...because Blackberry sucked at R&D
they had alot of users b/c for a long time their phones were the only game in town to send email and *also* another big factor is their 'enterprise' deals where they'd sell work phones to big companies on contract, ergo employees get company Blackberries
**that's** why Blackberry had users...and profits
their product was never actually competitively better and they didn't pioneer a market...just offered a service on a device first (email)...that's not really innovation
Thank you Dave Raggett
We think it still can & should be released, to help users retain some value in their mostly devices.
who is we?
Second, by announcing to the world that they're for sale they instantly froze the decision process of every corporation that was considering an upgrade to BB10. Why would any customer consider committing themselves to Blackberry for the next 2-5 years when they're not even sure Blackberry would last in (its current form at least) till the end of the year?
I think this concern is overblown.
--sent from my Palm Pixel
Second, by announcing to the world that they're for sale they instantly froze the decision process of every corporation that was considering an upgrade to BB10.
Because those 5 sales were going to save the company?
Blackberry's installed base is still very large so BB10 would have been considered a success if a good percentage of those customers had upgraded to the platform.
Yeah yeah. We've been hearing that line every year by the BB fanbois about how big the installed base was and yet apparently that installed base doesn't give two shits about current products.
Just waiting for them to get cheap enough that Google, Apple, or MSFT buys them wholesale.
Why do you refer to yourself as we? How many people exist in your head?
So far, I count three!
Such a slow and painful death brought about by a marked lack of new technologies in their final years. For all the apathy and hatred people throw at companies like Microsoft, they survive because they diversify and adapt (some better than others). Companies like Novell and Blackberry just seem to stagnate, while their core product line inevitably becomes too dated to support the bottom line any longer.
The really funny thing about all of this is just how predictable it should be for any technology company. Consumer demand changes pretty much every 1 to 3 years, and if companies aren't updating and innovating during that time, then they will go the way of Novell and Blackberry. Every time.
I'm a student at the University of Waterloo. These people are brilliant professionals. Some other interesting tech company will take its place in Canada's technology sector and hire these people.
Also RIM is a management nightmare. The ratio of managers to designers is 1:3. That's no way to get things done. Let's have a better structured company take over.
Die BlackBerry! Die!
Obama gonna be pissed
The entire tech industry has known for years that this was a sinking ship. If these people made no efforts to get out of it, then it is their own fault for finding themselves in the situation they soon face. There is absolutely nothing wrong with people who share's the GP's opinion.
I'll be happy when they die, so old people, especially executives (read: decision makers with my employer) will stop asking about them or suggesting we keep buying and using their crummy products (I'm looking at you, Blackberry Desktop Software).
High-tech companies, one failure away from oblivion. With shortening cycle times and increased numbers of competitors, it becomes even more unlikely that a company will never flop a generation of products.
This makes me sad, if only because it feels as if RIM was the only company that was thinking in terms of what business people need(ed) in a smart phone.
I still think there's a market for a smart phone that is actually intended to be used for document (especially e-mail) creation, and aimed at the needs of people who need to send and receive messages that run longer than three sentences.
On a day to day basis the things that I need from my phone aren't 10,000 music tracks, or the ability to watch a Breaking Bad marathon on the run, or Facebook. It's a solid and easy to use e-mail appliance; a tool for finding and reading information on the Internet; and a decent handling of documents. These are where RIM should shine, and should wipe the floor with either Android or Apple.
I won't speculate where they went wrong - although becoming stupidly rich probably played a role in the founders' decisions - but it's a loss.
Three Squirrels
Jack: What's going on? We have a right to know the truth!
Rumack: [to the passengers] All right, I'm going to level with you all. But what's most important now is that you remain calm. There is no reason to panic.
[Rumack's nose grows an inch long]
Rumack: Now, it is true that one of the crew members is ill... slightly ill.
[Rumack's nose continues to grow longer and longer, à la Pinocchio]
Rumack: But the other two pilots... they're just fine. They're at the controls flying the plane... free to pursue a life of religious fulfillment.
Good thing BlackBerry is not out of coffee.
Sig for hire.
While it is sad for the employees, investors and local economies, it is maybe for the best. Innovations take resources, and Blackberry was taking the resources and not giving the innovations for a long time. Same with Windows Phone.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
These people are brilliant professionals. Some other interesting tech company will take its place in Canada's technology sector and hire these people.
Maybe the new company can be in the telecom business ... and since it
will be based in Canada you could call it Nortel.
Brilliant doesn't mean much when you fail. A failure is a failure is a failure
regardless of the qualifications of the person who was behind the failure.
It's too late to save RIM. They should lay off the rest of their workforce and sell what's left to investors, if they still possess anything of value. The people with any insight have already left the company over the last 10 years. Those who are left aren't going to generate any new ideas that could turn the company profitable.
Hey Google or Samsung! Blackberry desperately needs to become a premium Android phone manufacturer. One of you buy them. Otherwise, if mickeysoft tries to buy them out, then BB goes all Nokia and its all tits up.
One group of customers that seems to really like Blackberry are teenage to twenty something girls who love the keyboard + good chat integration. I don't get why they don't focus on a potentially huge market that is genuinely enthusiastic about their products.
I love the idea of BlackBerry balance and wish they focused more on this. The idea of two way security is a unique feature. They should market to enterprise workers based on that.
On top of all of that, they have the ignominious position of being a big Canadian company, which means they need government approval to be sold. Since the government, up to recently, has made it clear they didn't want to lose BBY to a foreign owner, a sale was always going to be tricky to impossible. You'd need to find a domestic Canadian owner to buy it or else not at all. There are Canadian funds which have the capacity to make a buy. None have shown any known interest in doing that in the past or now. Nobody wants to throw good money at what is clearly a company past its prime.
Lacking a domestic buyer, a Microsoft or a Lenovo still cannot simply swoop in a buy BlackBerry like they might snap up some other company. It's against the law to do that. This complication is unavoidable and makes potential buyers look for something else to buy, and understandably so. Who wants to make a lot of press and do a lot of work to complete a purchase only to have it cancelled by a government agency on grounds of nationalism? Recently the crown has seen the writing on the wall and vast numbers of unemployed people in the future and said they would not necessarily prevent a foreign sale but they would not be happy about it either. Which again, is not much of an incentive for any buyer. Yay. They might not block us. Cough. What else is for sale? Nokia? Cool! Do it! HTC? Mmm ok. Maybe.
Meanwhile the value of Blackberry has tanked along with their prospects which make it even less likely that somebody will actually want to buy the company. Either they're headed for doom and there's no sense in buying, or they haven't stopped falling yet so might as well wait for the price to go down more. There is no rush. Their products will be as relevant (or not) a year from now as they are today.
If they totally collapse, then their patents will end up with somebody eventually who will be incentivized to license them probably for pennies on the dollar. Something like that would give lots of benefits to the usual suspect buyers for BlackBerry, but critically none of the hassle or mess of actually buying the company. So if you know you can get want you want for cheap and without hassle and all you have to do is wait... you would be silly to rush in now and try to do anything.
Waiting is the best scenario right now. Waiting until BBY has completely imploded and whatever is left is given to creditors. Then you act.
Sig for hire.
My brother once told me that when the geeks who run a technology company buy a sports team the company is then on a ballistic trajectory. From about 2006 to 2009 one of the founders futzed around buying a hockey team. I would think that buying/running a hockey team would be far more interesting than running a bloated tech company and definitely time consuming. Typically when you are running a large organization you need to be solving 100 problems at once all the time. So you have to pick the most significant problems and focus your time. With two large organizations you would simply have not enough time.
If you look at the stock history of BBRY you will see that it tanked (along with everyone else) in 2008 and started to come to life around 2009 which is when he got his hockey team; the stock then began its slide down down down.
I could make a list of the mistakes that BB has made over the years but I will point out an interesting one from around 2000. I downloaded their SDK for making applications that would run on their phones. Very cool, it was a pretty good SDK and I was very excited. But I couldn't really figure out how to get my application into the hands of all the MBAs out there using their BBs. The only route seemed to be to advertise in the backs of business magazines. This would have been an ideal time for them to have built an App Store. Every now and then some BB user would ask me for help to get some Expense management app or another onto their phones. It wasn't that easy. So as we all know now there was a huge demand for this sort of thing but I got the feeling that it was a very low priority for RIM.
Or the new company could be called A.V.Roe and go into the fighter airplane business and make a fighter called something like "The Arrow". Most of the best engineers from that program left Canada to work with NASA taking men to the moon. Lost to Canada forever.
. waterwingz
I take it that means the delayed promised messenger for other platforms is off?
Pay no attention to Chinese sovereign wealth funds buying sizable chunks of EnCana and the other Alberta Tar Sands plays.
Funny thing was, earlier this year I bought a Lenovo laptop with misgivings about backdoors. I live a boring life and am not active in politics, and in retrospect, maybe it's more secure against threats to my well-being than a US-sourced one. A Chinese takeover of BBRY isn't far-fetched. Someone's gotta build something that could be secure, even if at present it isn't.
And if Yamamoto had had his shit together at Midway, Slashdot Japan would be the only Slashdot, right? What was your point, again?
Watching the unfit commit sepuku is always good entertainment.
Blackberry earned the contempt. At my job they flushed them not because of the glittering iphone but because it was going to cost us around 500k a year to provide the licensed servers and crap required plus replace all the old phones. They went with the eyephone for the same reason they went with the BB 10 years ago. They got a deal. In this case it saved 400k. In 10 years someone will have some other spiffy communication device and we'll most likely go with it.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
So are you saying companies should continue existing simply because they're feeding x number of mouths? Damn those horseless carriages, right?
I hope that RIM rockband makes another video about this.
is playing a brilliant strategy. This billion dollar writedown lowers the stocks so it can be taken private. Meanwhile, BlackBerry announces the flagship Z30 to get users excited. Z10 hasn't been out that long, and already they're writing off stock? And Z10 is such an awesome phone, anyone who actually uses one loves it. It could only be for one reason, to take the company private asap. Expect announcement of sale soon.
Eyes Open Self-Hypnosis for Victory: Summon the Warrior
Keeping around obsolete companies isn't the solution.
However, the problem doesn't go away by ignoring it either. The real issues aren't that 10k people will lose their jobs, but rather:
1. Modern workers are highly specialized and can't command the same wage at just any job.
2. Modern employers still tend to employ a geographically-localized workforce.
3. #2 means that when a company dies you end up with 10k specialists in a particular area without jobs.
4. #1 means that there probably aren't 10k jobs in that same area to accommodate everybody who lost a job.
5. The utter lack of societal safety nets means no-job-your-sick-wife/parent/etc-dies, your kids sleep on the floor of some apartment, and so on.
6. The combination of #1 and #5 mean that re-training just isn't a practical option. Training is too expensive, and takes a long time during which you remain unemployed.
7. Sure, people can move, but that isn't very practical for families, and even for individuals it is highly disruptive to social networks (which are important - people aren't machines).
As a result there is a lot of political pressure to prop up dying companies. If we fixed the problems that make losing your job such a horrible event then perhaps we'd be more willing to kill off poor performing companies and let the workers spend their time someplace more useful.
No, he's saying that we shouldn't be rooting for companies to fail. What does the world gain from a company like RIM failing to produce great, new products? BB may be obsolete tech, but I'm sure somewhere along the line someone could have done something to diversify RIM's portfolio to keep that company afloat.
nothing I guess...your question doesn't make sense from a technical perspective
using STMP on a cell phone isn't innovation, because it's **the next logical step**
'email' is STMP
essentially it's a way to transmit text over a distance, **just like a telegram or pager**
it's text
phone calls are voice
combining the two functions from two devices into one device that does both is simply the next logical step
innovation is doing something outside of that simple development logic
Thank you Dave Raggett
I can take your word for it I guess, but this is credit to *engineers* not businesspeople
That's why I give Blackberry no respect...it was in the right place at the right time in cell phone evolution for a moment
Whatever 'innovation' happened when real engineers were hired to figure it all out and make it work...I can buy that...
But any rich idiot could have pounded their fist on the table and said "make me a pager that sends email and makes phone calls" and with enough money and the right engineers it would happen...
after that it's about their 'enterprise' strategy (which another post above in this thread has some good info on)
Thank you Dave Raggett
sorry to do this but I have to...for everyone's sake...we *need* to know what works and why, otherwise we will have to endure the next generation fucking things up the same way in tech business
this is why I refuse to let Blackberry and RIM off the hook...god bless their employees...i'm sure many did great work
but, look...here's the deal:
in the mid-90s **high school kids** had pagers...they were such barbaric 1-way only text gagets...but compared to nothing it was like telepathy
**ANYONE** with half a brain at that time would logically conclude that there is a market for a **two-way** texting device
the next logical step in functionality is not innovation
it's just not...
Thank you Dave Raggett
Lacking a domestic buyer, a Microsoft or a Lenovo still cannot simply swoop in a buy BlackBerry like they might snap up some other company.
Sure they can, at least now. They'll need regulatory approval but that will just be a rubber stamp at this point. I worked for WebCT when we were acquired by Blackboard. It was straightforward.
Blackberry stopped innovating like 10 years ago and expected to stay the leader in the smart phone industry. Blackberry OS 6.0 was the last real progress and innovation made by the company and from there on they have really just stood still and watched iOS and Android take over. The biggest joke of all is that BB10 was going to save the company! BB10 is a mix / copy of iOS and Android built on top of a third party ( which they own ) Operating System. If you want to make a new phone platform that is going to shake the status quo then you have two options, 1) Make it innovative and not a copy of the existing mobile operating systems or 2) switch to selling ice cream.
I have 0 formal business training but it's so obvious that even when I worked for Blackberry or Rim at the time it was already doomed. Internally the company at that time was a mess, it had no direction, no vision and no hard deadlines. Development in the company was a joke and I do mean a laughing joke, hardware was being designed and scrapped regularly and everyone passed the buck around never taking blame or control. Basically Blackberry was run and is ran is by a bunch of high school students trying to play in school business where if you fail you can restart tomorrow.
If they really want to save this company they need to start from the ground up and really try this time. Don't copy all the phones on the market, even if you originally designed them. Don't copy the software look, feel and operation and start making HARD deadlines that actually get met. This problem has been staring them in the face for a decade and thanks to really bad business leadership from the top down it's cost thousands or people jobs and money.
while it will be a blow to Waterloo Region economically, it will far be from a "Detroit" situation, we have many other local big tech companies such as Google, Christie Digital, Desire2Learn, Com DEV, Toyota, OpenText, and many others
It is sad to see BlackBerry go down, especially in Canada... which other high-tech company can shine that much here? We're going back to cutting logs and extracting tar sands...
But there is one point the world will miss: BlackBerry was the ONLY smartphone platform designed with the primary objective of maintaining your privacy and keeping your communication secure. We know how it went with India, the NSA and al, but at least security was at the core of their business. With BES companies knew that the only people able to access their data were the state-sponsored spies.
And they were not trying to sell Advertisement at every opportunity
Now we're left with Android and iOS, quite the opposite. With BlackBerry you were the customer, with Android and iOS you are the product.
That's the biggest change I see. And it's where BlackBerry let the world down.
David
I live in the region, and right now I'm glad I work for a startup based in another country. There's going to be increasingly fierce competition for those open positions around here over the next few years. Of course, I'm good enough that it wouldn't matter to me personally ;-)
We'll see what, if anything, it does to the real estate market.
www.clarke.ca
Unfortunately you and Blackberry's leaders have the same problem
You think *any* idea for how to solve a problem is *innovation*
It's not.
Without having a definition battle, linking to stuff, let me try to explain.
Commonalities emerge in any repeated action. In a job, you typically have similar problems on a daily basis that have similar solutions.
Humans naturally look for these commonalities and progressions and try to learn them.
**innovation**...like true innovation that is worth getting excited about...that is when a person goes outside that typical problem/solution modality in a way that changes all future context (sometimes on a bigger scale than others)
You are wanting the Nobel Prize for finishing your dissertation.
See, I know this b/c I am a HCI researcher and I was trained in telecommunications. I know the history of technology and where things like SMTP were...I agree that some **engineers** used innovative solutions to getting cell towers to speak SMTP
But that is what you expect from a tech company.
So nothing out of the ordinary or unpredictable about Blackberry's success...or failure
Thank you Dave Raggett
I work for another tech company in the area, and I've found the ex-RIM employees hired here to be generally bitter and filled with a sense of entitlement. I don't know if many of them will be able to cope post-BlackBerry.
The Arrow was an interceptor, damn you. Not a fighter. Interceptors were the muscle cars of 1950s/1960s aircraft -- very fast in a straight line. The mission was to sit on standby at a northern airstrip, launch at a moment's notice, climb to altitude goddamn quick, afterburner straight at incoming nuclear bombers, launch missiles at them in one or two passes, then return to base on whatever fumes were left in the tank (assuming there was one to return to). Unlike a fighter, turn performance and general maneuverability were not requirements at all.
Mind you, the Arrow would've been a good interceptor if it had been armed with a good missile (which wasn't certain, the U.S. designed missile it was supposed to have carried ended up being a failed project that got cancelled). It was a real rocket-ship of an aircraft, which was exactly what you'd want out of a Cold War supersonic interceptor. Just saying, it was not in any sense a fighter. It's a pet peeve of mine (even though I'm not Canadian!).
Blackberry really was a better product for quite a while, between corporate email support and vertical application integration support, but it was a business product, not a consumer product, and it was more specialized than generalized. Apple sold millions of phones to consumers, and while they've never been easy to support in a business environment (still aren't really), they were a big enough force for consumers to want to use them for business, and BB tanked.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
WTF? For lack of market is blackberry just making one up?