The fall of RIM

NortheasternPJ

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The key to that is SOLD not shipped.

I'm shocked they only shipped 500k, didnt HP sell more touchpads during the blowout sale?
 

mt8thsw9th

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Well, Apple actually sold the devices; BlackBerry merely shipped the (heavily discounted) Playbooks. Who knows how many are still sitting in inventory somewhere.
 

LoweTek

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JMD20 - You've been passionately negative about RIM in this thread. Just wondering why so much so? Did you own a lot of their stock? Former employee? There's reason to be critical about many of RIM's move or non-moves but you seem almost angry about them. I was honestly wondering why.
 

johnmd20

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JMD20 - You've been passionately negative about RIM in this thread. Just wondering why so much so? Did you own a lot of their stock? Former employee? There's reason to be critical about many of RIM's move or non-moves but you seem almost angry about them. I was honestly wondering why.
I don't have any of their stock and I rarely did even for my clients. I didn't make money on it when it went up and I didn't lose when it went down. I haven't been near the stock since the end of 2010 for what little I had, anyway. But the managerial hubris that caused this failure bothers me and it's coming out in anger. I am angry about it because I don't understand it. The company couldn't buy an iPhone in the past 5 years to see what it does?

RIMM's management has been like Baghdad Al. Always saying things are fine while everything is burning around them. I guess I shouldn't get angrier than the people at the top of the company. That's dumb. If they don't care, I shouldn't care that much either.
 

wade boggs chicken dinner

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I don't claim to know anything about the stock market outside of the basics, but what's with the bounce of RIMM today? Does it have to do with many closing their shorts?
My guess is that RIM, like Sears, may be worth more broken up than as a whole.

Sad about RIM. I moved to IPhone 18 months ago and I still miss my blackberry. But my boss bought the new one (Bold? Curve? Don't even remember) and he tried to update his operating system on Thursday and it took him all day and three battery removals. Of course his phone was inoperative during that time.

Too bad RIM didn't take a hard look at their operating system circa 2008. I mean it was pretty clear at that time it wasn't going to support what was coming around the corner.
 

dirtynine

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There are only a few successful big-time tech business models: disrupt industries and stay one step ahead (Apple, Google Search), copy the leaders really competently and quickly (Android, HP), undercut on price (Amazon), "blue ocean" (Nintendo), achieve and coast on pseudo-monopoly power (Microsoft Windows, Intel).

RIM used to be a disrupter / one-step-ahead-er. Then their business itself got disrupted. So they became a coater (with an eroding base) and a copier (but not a very quick, or a very good one). To bad they didn't try to disrupt back, pivot to a blue ocean - anything to reactivate their strong history of innovation.
 

Mr Weebles

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Now it's getting violent: Man Stabbed in Neck at Blackberry Party.

This isn't the kind of story we'd normally cover, but as some members of our team were present, we thought we'd bring you the news that a man has been left in a serious condition after reportedly being stabbed in the neck with a broken bottle at a BlackBerry event in London.

An argument broke out as guests were queuing to leave the event, resulting in a man in his 30s being injured. Police say the man is in a "serious" condition, according to the Telegraph.

He was taken to an East London hospital, while one man has been arrested and is in custody, the paper reports.
 

johnmd20

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Or don't. Nokia downgraded to junk. I spend a lot of time in Helsinki and the senior business community there is very, very pessimistic and disappointed in what seems to be the inevitable demise of Nokia as a Finnish national champion.
Apple and Android have crushed what were once the pride of Canada AND Finland. Still, I think NOK has a chance to turn around with the Lumia phone while I think RIMM has a lot more work ahead of them before they can get it going.
 

uncannymanny

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RIM Blackberry 10 debuts

I can't believe I'm typing this, but this phone actually looks like a competent competitor. New predictive text and "learning" keyboard look like actual innovation. I assume the device will fail on some basic flaws (laggy, resolution, cheap hardware), but it looks like the company's first good roll of the dice in the smartphone era. Interested to see early hands on looks.
 

Monbo Jumbo

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RIM hires J.P. Morgan, RBC to review business
(Canadian Press) -- WATERLOO, Ont. -- Research In Motion
(TSX:RIM) says it has hired two outside firms to advise on the
BlackBerry-maker's troubled business and financial performance.
The Waterloo, Ont.-based company says both J.P. Morgan
Securities LLC and RBC Capital Markets have been brought on
board as it expects to face an operating loss in the first
quarter.
Chief executive Thorsten Heins said in a statement that the
competitive environment for smartphones is impacting sales
volumes and pricing.

-0- May/29/2012 20:30 GMT
 

NortheasternPJ

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Not to mention the $1 billion in unsold phones and tablets.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-29/rim-writedown-risked-with-1-billion-inventory-corporate-canada.html
 

Sprowl

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What are RIM's businesses worth?

"We believe RIM's BlackBerry Enterprise Server and NOC architecture and recurring enterprise revenue stream are RIM's key strategic assets and are attractive to potential suitors," said Canaccord, which values the segment at about $2.75 billion. Other estimates peg the services business as being worth as much as $4.5 billion, but analysts also warn that using RIM's infrastructure to support other operating systems might be a technically challenging task.
...
RIM's patent portfolio would be attractive to Google, Apple, Samsung, Nokia, Microsoft and other players in the fast growing smartphone market. Analysts and bankers value RIM's patents at somewhere between $2 billion and $3 billion.
...
Analysts see little to no value in RIM's handset business, which likely lost money last year, according to some analysts who parsed the finer points of the company's filings. The big negative for RIM flagged by analysts at Nomura are the "likely long-term losses from the device unit and the possible $2 billion needed to gradually close this unit down."
...
RIM, whose current market capitalization has fallen to about $5.5 billion, in fact has a cash reserve of about $2.1 billion. But Wall Street is ascribing little to no value to this stash, as a large part of it will likely go toward restructuring costs.
 

jayhoz

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12 months ago my company had 10,000 blackberries in circulation. Today we have 5,000.

Anecdotal, but I think indicative of the dire situation RIM finds itself in.
 

NortheasternPJ

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12 months ago my company had 10,000 blackberries in circulation. Today we have 5,000.
I think I said it up thread, but we're in 5-10 companies a week and you're par for the course. 12 months after most orgs are somewhere between 40%-60% or so, give it 18 months you'll prob be at 25% and after 2 years I'd be shocked if you weren't under 10%.
 

jayhoz

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Q1 Earnings: Way worse than expected
Timing of BB10: Delayed
Layoffs: 5,000

Quite the ugly picture.
 

uncannymanny

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Will be interesting to see how they handle their IP like patents and such if they decide to pack it up.

(null)
 
M

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WSJ: "In the latest quarter, RIM's revenue plunged to $2.8 billion from $4.9 billion in the year-earlier first quarter. The company posted a net loss of $518 million, or 99 cents a share, in the quarter ended June 2."

Jesus christ, sales fell 33%? In one quarter? That's a pretty epic collapse.
 

zenter

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WSJ: "In the latest quarter, RIM's revenue plunged to $2.8 billion from $4.9 billion in the year-earlier first quarter. The company posted a net loss of $518 million, or 99 cents a share, in the quarter ended June 2."

Jesus christ, sales fell 33%? In one quarter? That's a pretty epic collapse.
They're lucky it was 33%. This is a quarter in which they...

1) Came out with nothing of note, up to and including plans for the future.
2) Apple and Android saw greater Exchange support and widespread adoption in the workplace.
3) Microsoft doubled-down (with Nokia) on WP7/WP8 which also has Exchange support.
4) Countries are suing left and right for access to encrypted email data.
5) RIM admitted it needed to rethink tablets and phones for the next generation.
6) Developers largely abandoned the ecosystem.
7) Co-CEO structure was only just recognized as rather directionless.

I'm surprised they were able to last this long, honestly. RIM's last major "godphone" was the Storm. Released in November... 2008. George W. Bush was still President. One could argue this phone was mere catch up, as it was half-baked interface-wise and pleased neither touchscreen nor keyboard fans.

People criticize Nokia and RIM for being similar, but I see a world of difference. Nokia was smart enough to tell investors: "This is our leader, this is our plan, and here are our exciting new phones." Almost every calendar year, Nokia did something right. You might disagree with the things they did, but it was orderly and made some sense.

Even Palm came up with a fully-integrated ecosystem, some pretty nice hardware, and an excellent interface design language (webOS). You can probably attest the final death of Palm as much to HP's ongoing (and always-highly-political) mismanagement as to Palm's inability to figure it out.

RIM's been napping for at least 4 years, resting on the laurels of "at least we have a keyboard." The Playbook was also half-baked, lacking email support and with nonexistent sync capabilities with blackberry phones. Imagine you're Edison General Electric and you sell a great new light fixture, but it doesn't accept your own bulbs. That's the Playbook. We know the Playbook could have sold - Amazon took what was essentially an oversupply of them, tweaked it, and sold it as the Kindle Fire. Like gangbusters.

RIM is lucky to be where they are. It's only because corporations move so slowly to adopt new technology that RIM is still coughing along at all.
 

wade boggs chicken dinner

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BGR reporting (link in this article - http://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/personal-tech/smart-phones/240006022 ) that RIM will be phasing out BES and BIS and that the new BB devices will not work on what is existing.

Lots of speculation about what this means, but if the article linked above is correct, yes I would guess that whatever people are remaining with RIM are going to leave in droves.

Too bad because I do miss my blackberry.
 

behindthepen

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I read through some of the reports a little more in-depth, and it sounds like for enterprises that stay on the old BB's, the existing BES will work. It's only if you want to upgrade to BB10, you will definitely need a new BES setup, but the cost, and the backward compatibility hasn't been disclosed.
\
Either way, the incentive for enterprises to migrate off of BB's continues to grow.
 

Blacken

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Just saw that. I think I hate everything now. But especially RIM.
 

mt8thsw9th

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So does anyone else picture a party inside the RIM offices akin to that at the Bluth Company when Jim Kramer upped the stock from "don't buy" to "risky"?
 

jayhoz

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This isn't going to help the turnaround.
 
“The U.S. launch of the Z10 started poorly and weakened significantly as the days passed,” Joseph Fersedi, an analyst at ITG Investment Research, said today in a note, citing information from independent dealers. Some U.S. retailers are seeing a significant increase in customers returning their Z10s because they find the interface unintuitive, Detwiler Fenton & Co. said today.
 
“In several cases, returns are now exceeding sales, a phenomenon we have never seen before,” Detwiler Fenton said.
 
Emphasis mine.
 

Fisks Of Fury

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My employer has a team which provides cross-platform mobile development tools. Keeping up with demand for support for new handsets, OS versions, and capabilities is the lifeblood of this team. When asked yesterday about support for the Z10, the product manager indicated that they had received zero requests from any of our customers/prospects for that support. Zero. Given the number of requests we get when a new iDevice verion is rumored, never mind announced, that's significant.
 
I've also been on dozens of sales calls with enterprise customers over the last few months, and in every case the Z10 (as well as every other RIM product) has been completely discounted as a future direction of interest.
 
But this most telling evidence is that my company itself, previously a Blackberry bastion with 5000+ devices deployed to the workforce, has just begun a migration to a BYOD model which will support iOS, Android, and Windows 8 phones only. Given how staid and conservative our IT management team is (they are German, after all, and JUST started migrating us off of MS Office 2003) that's a major statement in itself.
 

wade boggs chicken dinner

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jayhoz said:
"In several cases, returns are now exceeding sales, a phenomenon we have never seen before,” Detwiler Fenton said.
 
Not that I have a dog in this fight, but what is this supposed to mean?  That peeps bought BBerry unlocked for $900.00 and are now trying to return it back to the carriers?
 
IMO, BBerry is not going to last long as a phone carrier (as opposed to NOK, which is concentrating on lower-end phones and which I think is the right strategy), but the QNX kernel is still a valuable asset.
 
I'm still sad that BBerry wasn't able to keep up with the times.
 

jayhoz

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The Q10 launched on 3/22 w/ AT&T for $199. Presumably the people who bought them at launch are returning them at a faster clip than people are buying them today.
 

crystalline

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wade boggs chicken dinner said:
 
Not that I have a dog in this fight, but what is this supposed to mean?  That peeps bought BBerry unlocked for $900.00 and are now trying to return it back to the carriers?
 
IMO, BBerry is not going to last long as a phone carrier (as opposed to NOK, which is concentrating on lower-end phones and which I think is the right strategy), but the QNX kernel is still a valuable asset.
 
I'm still sad that BBerry wasn't able to keep up with the times.
QNX as a phone OS or in its general form as a RTOS (ie what RIM bought)? I would guess the phone OS has little value because vendors that want an OS can build off Android. WebOS seems like it has little value now.
What I'm getting at is whether QNX is worth what they paid for it or if RIM has built up significant value in the past few years.
 

Blacken

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QNX is still valuable, but RIM hasn't done much with it to improve its standing in places where it's taken seriously (i.e., not phones).
 

Jimy Hendrix

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wade boggs chicken dinner said:
Not that I have a dog in this fight, but what is this supposed to mean?  That peeps bought BBerry unlocked for $900.00 and are now trying to return it back to the carriers?
 
IMO, BBerry is not going to last long as a phone carrier (as opposed to NOK, which is concentrating on lower-end phones and which I think is the right strategy), but the QNX kernel is still a valuable asset.
 
I'm still sad that BBerry wasn't able to keep up with the times.
 
There were previous months/weeks of sales, so it could mean that current sales have dropped off, then people who bought it previously are returning it. That's my takeaway from that ridiculous statistic.
 

LoweTek

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BBRY is asking regulators to investigate the claims of high return rates indicating they are false and implying the report was nothing more than an attempt to manipulate the stock.
 

BlackBerry (BB.TO) said on Friday it would ask securities regulators in Canada and the United States to probe a report about retail return rates for its new Z10 smartphone that it called "false and misleading."
 
http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/blackberry-ask-regulators-probe-report-141509012.html
 

SoxFanInCali

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Well, I can confirm that my company ordered 2 of them from AT&T when they first came out, and returned them 2 weeks later.  Given that Blackberry was pushing clients to install the new BES 10 infrastructure before any phones were available to test, I'm guessing that we weren't the only ones to do this.
 

NortheasternPJ

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wade boggs chicken dinner

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SoxFanInCali said:
Well, I can confirm that my company ordered 2 of them from AT&T when they first came out, and returned them 2 weeks later.  Given that Blackberry was pushing clients to install the new BES 10 infrastructure before any phones were available to test, I'm guessing that we weren't the only ones to do this.
 
Do you know why they returned them so quickly?  Interested in hearing anecdotes.
 

SoxFanInCali

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wade boggs chicken dinner said:
Do you know why they returned them so quickly?  Interested in hearing anecdotes.
The main reasons given were the lack of apps and the gestures not being intuitive.  People also thought it looked and felt cheap.
 
I played around with one for a bit.  It was functional, but nothing stood out.  I've got a free one on the way from BlackBerry and want to test it further, but there's not really anything that grabs the user and makes them want to choose it over an Android or iPhone.  They need to get the Q10 out, so they can at least serve the people that want the physical keyboard.
 

jayhoz

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Despite launching 2 new phones, BB lost 4 million subscribers last quarter. They have lost 8 million over the last 3.

Bye bye.
 

wade boggs chicken dinner

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[SIZE=11pt]BBRY has now falled to #4 in mobile operating systems.  Things look bleak for their strategy, at least in mobile handsets.[/SIZE]
 
[SIZE=11pt]Interesting article - http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/13/4617930/message-unread-silicon-valleys-secret-failed-bid-to-save-blackberry - on a course of action that was proposed last year.  BBRY is going to be a fascinating case study for years to come.  Snippet:[/SIZE]
 
[SIZE=11pt]Yesterday, entrepreneur and angel investor Robin Chan posted a slide deck for "Project BBX," a now-abandoned plan to turn around the company with a small product and engineering team. With BlackBerry now officially exploring a sale, Chan’s plan offers a glimpse of what BlackBerry might have become — a purely business-focused company with no BlackBerry 10, fewer devices, and no reason to hire Alicia Keys as a creative director. Instead, it would focus on its trademark phones and data network, leaning on iOS and Android in order to survive.[/SIZE]
 
 

jayhoz

Ronald Bartel
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It turns out that no one gives a fuck about a physical keyboard.  No one could have predicted that.  :p
 
 
Chris Jourdan, who owns and operates 16 Wireless Zone stores in the Midwestern U.S. that sell Verizon Wireless products, said customers didn't show up for the Q10 as expected. His stores only ordered a few of the devices per location and "the handful that sold were returned."
 
"We saw virtually no demand for the Q10 and eventually returned most to our equipment vendor," he said.
In another indication the new BlackBerry devices aren't selling well, used phone dealers aren't reporting the flood of old BlackBerrys that typically comes when updated devices are released. Jeff Trachsel, chief marketing officer at NextWorth, which buys used electronics, said both the all touch-screen Z10 and Q10 launches were "nonevents" from a trade-in perspective.
"We thought there would be a pocket of die-hard BlackBerry enthusiasts waiting to upgrade, but it seems they have already moved on," he said.
 

Rudi Fingers

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I switched to an all-touch Z10 back in July, and I love the phone.  It is certainly not for everyone, but it's brilliant for managing my four email accounts,  The phone has outstanding speed and reception, and simultaneous voice and LTE on Verizon is a huge bonus for me.   On the new OS 10.1, I'm pulling solid 12+ hour battery life with heavy use - I'm shocked.  I'm also lucky enough to have BES 10 service with virtually no corporate restrictions. 
 
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MentalDisabldLst

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I give lots of fucks about a physical keyboard.  When the Motorola Droid 4 came out, I quickly used my renewal upgrade to get it, specifically because of the physical keyboard.  I type 5-10x faster using two thumbs than a single index finger.
 
But I wouldn't have done so without a touchscreen, full web browser support, app store, maps functionality, or any of the various things that make a modern smartphone really fucking useful.  Blackberries just feel like they're still intended to have character-based screens and were designed with that in mind.
 

AlNipper49

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I've been using an iPhone basically since they came out, and am typing on it "super frequently".  I've never come even close to what I could do in a standard Blackberry keyboard (which were light years above anything else, like shitty Treos or whatever).