Yesterday, in addition to announcing a large loss for the fiscal first quarter ended and disclosing that BlackBerry 10 will be delayed until Q1 2013, RIM said it would cut 5,000 jobs, about 30% of its staff, in order to reduce costs. Some might say RIM has reached the end of the road while some say it is on a definite road to failure, but you gotta give it to RIM – they intend to do it on their own.
Despite all the media buzz about RIM splitting into two, an effort some people interpreted was abandoning BlackBerry, CEO Thorsten Heins forcefully rejected the idea of adopting some other company’s OS – be it Windows Phone or Android – to replace BlackBerry OS in future devices.
“We came to the decision that joining the family of the Android players, for example, would not fit RIM’s strategy and its customers,” he said. “We are not trying to be one of many. We’re trying to be different. We’re trying to be the best solution for our customers that buy a BlackBerry, know why they want a BlackBerry. And we’re aiming for nothing less than being a viable, successful, mobile computing platform of the future. This is what we’re aiming at. And I think that’s the difference. If you compare us with others, did we take the hard rod? Absolutely. Absolutely. But having done this and building and completing this new mobile computing platform that then expresses itself as a smartphone or as a tablet or as a vertical application or embedded in cars, whatever you want to do, that is where we will take BlackBerry. And this is – that’s why it was absolutely required and necessary to build its own platform. I would argue the other way around. If I continue to rely on somebody else’s OS and somebody else’s platform, would that allow me in the long run to really differentiate towards my customers and provide them the services and the environment that they request from me and that they would like to have? I have a big question mark around this. So I think going this way and building the platform we are building has the absolute intent to serve our customers and our markets better than on a standard-based OS and platform.”
According to a report from Reuters, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer approached RIM in recent months about cutting a deal similar to the one Microsoft has with Nokia.
What was the idea?
Abandon the BlackBerry OS 10 fiasco and adopt the upcoming Windows Phone 8 software instead. Which happens to be the route Nokia took. They opted to abandon Symbian in favor of Windows to power their high-end phones. Should RIM have caved in, Microsoft would presumably have taken a stake in RIM, providing the company some badly needed cash.
So while the Reuters piece says the RIM board is “under mountain pressure” to consider forming an alliance or selling its network business, Heins has made it pretty clear he’s intending to stick to the plan and move ahead with BlackBerry 10. For better or worse.
Source: Forbes