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BlackBerry Posts $4.4 Billion Loss, Will Outsource To Foxconn
iONiUM writes "Today BlackBerry announced a $4.4 billion loss, and a deal with Foxconn to outsource hardware manufacturing. One interesting stat is that 75% of sales were actually older BB7 devices. That said, CEO John Chen says, 'We are very much alive, thank you.' He adds, 'Our "for sale" sign has been taken down and we are here to stay. BlackBerry recently announced it has entered into an agreement to receive a strategic investment from Fairfax Financial and other institutional investors, which represents a vote of confidence in the future of BlackBerry.'"
'Our "for sale" sign has been taken down and we are here to stay.'
This is the textbook precursor words before a "transition team" chops it up for parts and sells everything off piecemeal. It's right in the MBA manual.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
They need to focus on business end Android phones with hardware keyboards.
I like eating the forbidden iFruit. Also, we are in an Android iFruit C# DBA whatever whatever jobs bubble. Engineering is dead. Once the service economy of the U.S.A. implodes, so will these job.
captcha: jobs
I'm not dead yet!
Sig: I stole this sig.
Can anybody more versed in PR speak please translate what "strategic investment" means?
I think we've seen where niche brands stick around a little due to legacy, personal preference, and lowering the price point.
Does Blackberry do anything that Android or iOS can't though? Honest question. I haven't looked at them in a while.
It is obvious that Android and iOS can do a lot of things a Blackberry can't, and honestly it is probably too late for them to roll out their own smart phone OS.
I remember fondly playing my C64 well up until the days when Computer Boutique had them down to a single discount section.
In the long run, the superior product has always won out. The question is if Blackberry can get a niche market that smart phones aren't optimized for: Low Power Draw or something, and maybe they have a core base of fans that isn't going away. They should listen to the people who use their product and maintain a good relationship with them. Again, In the long run, the superior product has always won out. And Smart Phones are superior in most ways to Blackberries. The CEO might be saying,"We're very much alive, thank you.", but he's just looking in the short run. He might as well be saying,"We're not dead yet." Unless they adopt Android, their days are numbered, but they can no doubt make some money in the short run. I wouldn't invest in this company though if I had a choice. They're beaten senseless by smart phones.
...then license your tablet and phone OS immediately.
The tablet OS never, ever crashes, runs any Gingerbread app, and is a far superior experience to Android. Blackberry should give the OS away for free for any tablet that has CPUs under 1ghz (as long as the vendor writes the drivers).
The phone OS builds on the tablet, will load any .APK, runs other vendors' market apps, and is judged a far, far superior experience by Android converts. Blackberry should give the phone OS away to any vendor running CPUs under 800Mhz (as long as the vendor writes the drivers).
If Blackberry takes market share, it will win. This cannot be done as a vertically-integrated platform.
This $4.4B loss is one of those "throw everything out including the kitchen sink" financial quarters, where a struggling, money-losing public company tries to purge itself and basically write everything off at once, including expenses/charges that may not have happened yet. The purpose of this financial engineering is partly to make future earnings look better, both on a comparable basis but more importantly because so many expenses got thrown into the loss and so future revenue will have fewer expenses charged against it, giving the appearance of an earnings recovery. The stock is heavily shorted by smart money and they know this large "loss" is guaranteed result in future positive earnings "surprises" so they'd rather take their short earnings off the table and let the dumb money fight it out in the intermediate term.
They still have that air of exclusivity that some PHBs covet. And since the average PHB (and the people he tries to impress) know little about technology but a lot about status symbols...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Tried to get an engineering job lately? Go on. Browse Dice's listings. I challenge you. Tell me how many EE, ME, AE, or CE jobs there are for someone who has graduated recently or doesn't have decades of experience. And of those, how many aren't "defense?"
There's the adage about how anyone who has to keep reminding everyone that they're the leader is no leader at all. Seems as if the same applies here. If a company has to keep insisting that it's still alive, it really isn't.
They may not be selling many Blackberries, but they seem to be doing OK in real-estate. They just sold five buildings to the University of Waterloo: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/university-of-waterloo-buys-blackberry-buildings-land-for-41-million/article16074015/
Funny our PHBs all wanted iPhones. Around here they pushed the BlackBerrys so hard that it was just the norm for most of the teens to have, so they weren't considered status symbols at all. However us IT people preferred the BlackBerrys. Better emails, sound profiles, alerts, etc. As far as I know there is still no way on Android or iPhone to emulate priority 1 alerts on BlackBerry (breaks sound profile to be loud even if you are on vibrate).
The closest I have found is to pay extra for TouchDown on Android which allows you to create e-mail rules on the phone. You can set it to "nag until cancel", but it still will only vibrate if the phone is in vibrate mode, and if another message comes in afterwards that doesn't fir the nag until cancel rule it stops. Our development team is looking to create their own alert system to do this on the iPhones, which I think will skip the emails all together.
Users like the app selection and much better browsing on the iPhones now, but in all reality how important is that in a work environment.
It's hard to say for sure, but I suspect this is mostly existing corporate customers who are already standardized on BB7 company-wide just buying more devices, as replacements for broken devices, and/or to provide devices to new staff. That provides a nice short/medium-term revenue stream, but is only sustainable in the long-term if, when these corporate customers eventually replace their BB7 infrastructure, they go with something newer that's also from BlackBerry, rather than moving elsewhere.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This stock is going to climb! Get in now!
Where did PHBs covet them?
Towards the end of the BB peek it was a middle and lower level thing ("Slave Pager"), higher level employees would brag about not needing them, because stuff was covered. They didn't need to be always connected, then iPhone came, and people wanted them, because you could goof off on them AND get e-mail.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Well, the latest unreleased builds run Android apps without the user having to fiddle around the system. They run as smooth and as fast as on any android device. And like the iPhone devices users have full control over what features an app can access. There are too many BBM features to mention that android users have any idea about.
Imagine if they made phones where all communications are encrypted, and all of the encryption keys are stored on the phone itself. Throw in a Tor-like network to scatter packets, and make it so that unencrypted data never goes through Blackberry's networks or servers. Make it so that it's impossible for anyone to find out who is communicating with whom, and the phones will sell like hotcakes.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
If so, how many surprise reboots have you had over the last two months? This never happens with QNX. PalmWebOS was just Linux; QNX is a different animal. Get a beagle bone to see the technical side. Understand it, and you will appreciate an alternative ecosystem which is superior for many uses.
Um...
BlackBerry is a Canadian company.
Some Chinese companies have learned a neat trick.
Diamond Back did it 20-30 years ago, I suspect Foxconn will do it next.
With the BlackBerry and Apple designs and process knowledge they've provided to Foxconn, Foxconn will soon have little need for these American companies. They can just sell the next generation under the Foxconn brand.
Can someone explain how the books looked fine for so long then all of a sudden tanked? I had assumed that all the dire talk was negative PR.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
native apps don't make sense, and Apple Store is proof positive, because before people used Apple products they likely had to buy the console-advertised apps on their previous phones and when they got proficient they migrated to another device on their next contract of service. It makes sense to use a compatibility or application layer such as a Java Virtual Machine or a web browser's abilities to run your applications just so you can take what you payed for to your next platform when the current one dies or is terminated.
Apple is the biggest monopoly, more anti-competitive than Microsoft ever will, has been caught underpaying for labor, has been proven to be a strip miner of global minerals, has been praised by marketroids and investors for overcharging for products, and it's primary leader and founder Jobs re-advertised his death as from Pancreatic Cancer when in-fact he died of Pancreatic Cancer due to his swinger lifestyle popping LSD and contracting HIV/AIDS.
Apple likely will not die, and like Halliburton will move to another country before it ever loses it's capital and investments. Microsoft on the other hand was split into Micros~1 and Micros~2.
Actually, the way "Merica" is going it will become the 11th Province of Canada, or maybe the 4th territory soon enough. We will have to have a vote in parliament about it I guess.
Now that BlackBerry is switching to Foxconn, I wonder what the Flextronics plants that used to make their stuff is going to do? Make more Motorola phones? I hope so.
They already do. I'm writing this using Foxconn's nT-A3500, nice small machine with AMD E350. It was rather cheap - that's why I bought it. It can be put at the back of monitor (using VESA mount points) making it poor's person iMac, and takes below 30W. I can even run VM on it without large performance penalty. Since I have this machine, I use my full desktop less often.
Check the latest release notes. Apps that crash the OS are the fault of the OS, not the app. Android turns Linux into a Windows95 reliability experience.
The Apple Brand has all the value. The hardware is mediocre. No one would buy a Foxconn phone without the brand.
If i recall correctly, Apple/Jobs did something like that. They partnered with some other phone company for a while before striking out on their own
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
If Android doesn't crash, then why is this developer using ACRA for various exploding devices?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12556968/getting-crash-logs-debug-information-from-android-users