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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'm not dead yet!
Sig: I stole this sig.
Engineering is dead. Once the service economy of the U.S.A. implodes, so will these job.
American engineering is very much alive. The same can't be said for high tech manufacturing.
Can anybody more versed in PR speak please translate what "strategic investment" means?
...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.
We will never be in a DBA bubble as long as data is king. For most companies, their database is an order of magnitude more valuable than their code base.
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.
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.
I wouldnt buy engineered in America for any money.
You can keep your spyware.
Alright.
In the past three months I've received 2 job offers.
I'm not even looking for a job and I'm not yet graduated.
I've done electrical engineering and am now finishing computer engineering.
None of those were in defense, although one would have required a thorough background check and some amount of security clearance.
I'm in canada, and we can't keep our engineers bottled up. Their 3rd year co-ops started paying more than starting faculty positions, so we had to change the rules and forcibly limit them to about 26 an hour.
Our graduates are going all over in canada and the US, starting salaries 70-80k. And we aren't a particularly spectacular engineering school. Electrical, mechanical, I don't know about civil, computer and software. (I've never had anything to do with the civil people as I'm in CS and our cross courses that I have been involved in are only with the others).
If you can't find work either people don't think your degree is legit, or you're doing a terrible job presenting yourself. Hell, our graduates who can barely communicate in english are getting great jobs.
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/
And how long do you think it will be before engineering gets automated?
About the time we develop AI, and machines do the thinking for us.
Om, nomnomnom...
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
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.
Say what? We still make airplanes, cars, processors, drugs, etc. in this country. If you don't consider that high tech manufacturing, I don't know what is then.
Hell, our graduates who can barely communicate in english are getting great jobs.
That's because the first thing an employer thinks when they find someone with broken English is "Cool, temporary worker, I don't have to provide benefits!", A 70k job without benefits in Boston or Silicon Valley is basically equivalent to a minimum wage job in other parts of the USA. You can live on it, but its got no future.
I graduated in the 2001 meltdown, and was unable to get engineering work. I took whatever work I could get, but ultimately, I joined a start-up instead. Where I currently live, there is nothing in engineering jobs within 200 miles in any direction. I'm not saying there is nothing worth having, I'm saying there is nothing at all. I went looking to find out what I should offer when i needed to bring on my first employee, and discovered I could offer 30k with minimal benefits, and I still got over 300 applications. I ultimately ended up paying 45k with somewhat better benefits, because I was impressed by the guy, but I probably could have held my ground and still got him anyways. Down the road, I expect he will transition well to a leadership role as we grow further.
If you look on monster.com, or dice, for "engineering", there are remarkably few postings. For the geographic northeast USA, there were only 35 new postings per day, for all jobs matching the term "engineering". That is out of a population of 50 million people. By contrast, my school graduated 2000 engineering students the year I graduated. In the US, every year, more than 50k engineering students graduate. That's only enough jobs for the existing graduating class for this country, add to that the 600,000 Chinese graduates and 350,000 Indian graduates who are all competing for these same jobs, its no wonder everyone wants to increase the H1-B visas. If we could expand the labor pool to include both of those labor sources, we can thoroughly unbalance the supply and drive labor costs down. The labor supply in both China and India dramatically outweighs the demand, in large part because of the belief in the ability to enter the american job market. These people do not want to live in the states permanently, just stay a decade or so, and save up to retire "back home". An Indian worker can earn enough in the US in fifteen years to effectively retire when they return to India. For rural Chinese, the duration is even shorter, although the cost of living in China is increasing rapidly. These are people that american companies do not have to pay benefits, nor retirement expenses for. This effectively cuts the payroll expense in half, even if the worker earns the same wage.
As a former job seeker, I fully understand how it sucks. As an employer, I am in a position to pay an american worker, but largely because in my current line of business I have no effective competition yet. When that changes, and I have to compete, I will be taking the least expensive option.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
So which OS do you use on your PC? Windows (engineered in Washington, USA), Mac OS X (engineered in California, USA), or Linux (engineered by a lot of different people, and headed by Linus Torvalds who lives in the USA somewhere)?
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
Yeah it's TOTALLY "wow somebody with limited English skills, possibly a fresh graduate, and possibly with shaky immigration work status, we can hire a lot of them for peanuts and since they don't know who we are, they'll fall for low salary offers and not complain AT ALL when we don't train them and throw shovels of work at them"
My Canadian employer hires tons of these folks because most of them will work for 1/3rd what they'd normally pay. Lack of common languages means they are isolated in the workplace and keep their heads down and don't ask for anything. Most of them last a year or two before they bail and attempt to cash in a couple years of experience at the company.
It is quite honestly a WTF moment when HR announces we've hired somebody who is not immediately obviously an immigrant -HR passes around photos and little bios on the new hires so yes, we DO know exactly where they are from and what ethnicity they have, what they like to eat, last place they travelled, and so on. The hiring bias is incredible and somewhat of an open joke.
The company does this just because these workers are cheap.
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Sig for hire.
The main thing wrong with Canada's manufacturing is the way you folks stick your noses in the air and snub anything made in the US, while down in the US, nobody pays much of any mind at all where things are made and honestly don't care if their Toyota was made in Louisiana or Ontario or Japan.
Nobody here cares that 90% of our shampoo and soaps are made in Canada. But you can BET Canadian shoppers check carefully before they buy soap and make sure it's not made in USA. Eewwww it's from America. Yuck.
I am one of the few who does care. I was honestly glad my last plane trip was on Embraer equipment instead of Canadair. I avoid buying Canadian whenever I can. Generally this works well for me.
Sig for hire.
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!
Wow. That was a xenophobic rant. Given that Canadair was sold off in 1986, I'd fly on an Embraer instead, too. I live in Canada, and honestly don't have much opportunity to buy US-made technology. I bought a Pontiac Vibe in 2007, and it was a great little car (although basically a Japanese design made in Fremont). I buy lots of tech gear designed by US companies but made in China and shop at American-owned stores like Walmart, Costco and Target. I'm really not a sure where you get the bizarre notion that we're anti-American.
Apple is the biggest monopoly, more anti-competitive than Microsoft ever will,
I hate to defend Apple, but while you're probably right that Apple is more anti-competitive than MS (their ridiculous patent war with Samsung should be proof of this), they do not have the kind of monopoly that MS did. Apple is still a pretty small player on desktops and laptops, it's not even a player in the server market; their main area of strength is in mobile devices. However, even here, they have pretty strong competition from Android, and don't have anything approaching a monopoly. It's a good thing, too; things would really suck if the iPhone was our only realistic choice for a smartphone. Android has its shortcomings to be sure, but iOS has its own shortcomings, and monopolies are never good, as we saw with MS's Windows monopoly for so many years.
has been caught underpaying for labor
Doesn't every large company that manufactures in China do this?
has been proven to be a strip miner of global minerals
Isn't every company that manufactures electronics guilty of this? It's not like Apple is the only company that uses tantalum capacitors.
when in-fact he died of Pancreatic Cancer due to his swinger lifestyle popping LSD and contracting HIV/AIDS.
This sounds like a rather absurd allegation; any evidence? Lots of people get pancreatic cancer, for no particular reason. From what I read, Steve's real screw-up was refusing conventional medical treatment for it until it was too late.
Microsoft on the other hand was split into Micros~1 and Micros~2.
Huh? What are you talking about? MS is still a single company, as much as I would prefer they got broken up.
american _companies_ do engineering but they are - less and less - staffed with americans.
at least silicon valley, this is true. folks born in the US are the minority in bay area tech companies. and its not getting more balanced, its getting less so, as time goes on.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
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)
70-80k for a fresh graduate is not bad.
I can't speak to the job sites in the US, but here we have recruiters coming to classrooms, and indeed.com seems to be working quite well as an aggregator.
I think we've got about 35 new engineering positions a month in the city I'm in, of 400k people. It sounds to me like you're searching wrong. At least assuming you have an actual engineering degree, and not a technician diploma or a degree in physics - those guys are screwed.
>A 70k job without benefits in Boston or Silicon Valley is basically equivalent to a minimum wage job in other parts of the USA. You can live on it, but its got no future.
70k starting salary for an undergrad is pretty good anywhere. Even in the valley.
And as I say, we're not even a great school. Good schools you've actually heard of can command much more.
>Cool, temporary worker, I don't have to provide benefits
Good luck trying that in canada.
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