[Paul Collins4]

Is it a good move for BlackBerry? Is the company good or bad? Personally I wouldn't like to support the company because of the way they treat their workers but hey everyone is entitled to their own opinions and everyone's views are different. Post your views below

Posted via CB10

[heymaggie]

I'm a fan. They make a great iPhone for me every year and probably most of the other computer hardware I use on a daily basis, come to think of it. I guess you could call me a Fox-connoisseur. They seem to be pretty good at making the stuff that I like to buy and use.

As for whether they offer good value, you'd have to ask Apple about that. As for whether they are good to work for, you'd have to ask their employees.

I guess it's an important question because they will probably buy the Blackberry smartphone business eventually and use it as their house brand. Blackberry seems to be moving away from the hardware production chain while companies like Lenovo and Foxconn all want to make their own branded products. This will be especially true if Blackberry is brand that will increasingly focus on developing markets.

[WArcher]

Is it a good move for BlackBerry? Is the company good or bad? Personally I wouldn't like to support the company because of the way they treat their workers but hey everyone is entitled to their own opinions and everyone's views are different. Post your views below

Posted via CB10

It was the Chinese locations which were under such scrutiny for poor conditions and suicides and that was a couple of years ago.

If you replay the conference call you'll hear that John Chen specifically says that the new devices will be manufactured in the Mexico Foxconn plants. This makes sense in that it's easier for people from Waterloo to do QA and collaborate if everyone's on the same time zone and there are more or less direct flights from Toronto to Mexico.

If you read this Wiki Foxconn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia you'll see that they're also building the new PS4 as well as several other non-Apple products already.

[propeller10]

Foxconn is a terrible company and should be burnt to the ground.

wait..what? Foxxconn will be making devices for Blackberry?

oh.. then Foxconn is amazing and Blackberry made the right move by partnering up with them. I hope to get married in a foxconn manufacturing facility. I freaking love the whole company.

[Paul Collins4]

Some valid points there

Posted via CB10

[Bla1ze]

My only concern with the Foxconn deal is that the devices will end up very generic looking. I don't really care about the company's history, I've been down the road plenty of times before on the forums. Overall though, it's a sound move for BlackBerry financially.

[Paul Collins4]

Will the quality of the device be better than the current ones?

Posted via CB10

[Bla1ze]

Will the quality of the device be better than the current ones?

Posted via CB10

That all depends on how much BlackBerry is paying Foxconn to care. Practically every tech company in the world has given money to Foxconn at some point but do you think the level of quality on say the Firefox OS phones that Foxconn builds is a high as the iPhone 5s that Apple pays them to build? If BlackBerry pays for quality they'll get quality. If they pay for subpar quality they'll get subpar quality. Foxconn builds what companies pay them to build.

[whatsever]

Nobody care about the labour in china and now blackberry goes asia with budget and mayby high end models made by foxconn really need 2 new touchscreen phone's with 1,2 and 1,7 ghz processor and one with 4,2 and the other 5 inch screen.

call them
Z4 with 1,2 Ghz processor, 4,2 inch screen no hdmi, no 4G (asia and europe market)
Z5 with 1,7 Ghz processor 5 inch screen , no hdmi ,with 4G (asia and europe market)

Blackberry must sell there phone's with 5 years service plan in Europe, indonesia ,India with means after 2 years you can repair it as first owner
against cost price only.

Sell there own product online at blackberry.com free delivery world wide.

They must make deals against low profit and take stock back from operator to sell the products.

They must visit operators and store's to motivate,promote staff and give away nice prices to win.

They must Also advertise that blackberry 10 is the new touchscreen experience with android runtime inside to run android apps and blackberry apps and still the using the most protected phone secured by blackberry, trend micro or just by your own company. We have the best of all world so what stops you to move to buy blackberry to get you move on in this world. Blackberry 10 the new touchscreen experience.

[heymaggie]

I don't think there's any question that Foxconn can produce devices of the highest quality. However, there are probably hundreds of design decisions that are made based on price and availability.

I remember that in one of the Touchpad postmortem interviews, someone from HP said that they wanted to make a better tablet but Apple had cornered the market on the best tablet parts for the iPad 2 (remember, this was pretty early in the table game) so even the mighty HP couldn't get what they really wanted. That's one of the reasons why the Touchpad ended up kind of heavy and bloated and immediately bombed in the stores.

I think it's safe to say that phones targeted at developing markets and targeted at a lower price point probably won't have the same components as the higher-end phones. Chen did say that for developed markets, that Blackberry would be focused on the enterprise market. I'm guessing that a phone that you distribute to your employees will probably be designed differently than the phone that is specifically designed and built to make you want to touch it. At least the PCs I have at work seem that way.

[RayB1]

Outsourcing is one of those things that in the short term may look good on paper by finance department who were directed to make it look good on paper. Outsourcing is not always the right strategic move. Look at the companies that are going full circle and realizing the the theft of IT, the lack of control over QC, the cost of oversight are just a few of the costs that the finance departments glossed over when writing the paper justifying outsourcing. More than one company has learned the painful and expensive lesson that when outsourcing fails, it fails big.

Depending on how the agreement is crafted, 5 years will represent a period short enough that BB can reverse course and take back production. This means that Foxconn would need to take over management of the current manufacturing operations of BB. BB manufactured in Mexico. I support manufacturing in Mexico. The contract would then need to be crafted to allow BB to take the plants back from Foxconn if they wanted to go separate ways in 5 years or 10 years. I support manufacturing in Mexico which keeps Mexicans gainfully employed which reduces our illegal alien problem.

Unfortunately, BB has not indicated the support of their manufacturing operations and whether or not those that supported the company will be getting paychecks from Foxconn, or whether they will be swimming across the Rio Grande in six months. I can only hope that a responsible company made it part of the deal that Foxconn was to continue manufacturing at the current facilities. If the BB plants are simply closed, then BB will not be in a strong negotiating position to take back production, because all of the expensive manufacturing plants and all of the employees will be gone.

[Troy Tiscareno]

Actually, they said that the "Jakarta" phones will be made in the FoxConn plant in Indonesia. Nothing else has specifically been made official.

[Bonnie Bonzai]

My only concern with the Foxconn deal is that the devices will end up very generic looking. I don't really care about the company's history, I've been down the road plenty of times before on the forums. Overall though, it's a sound move for BlackBerry financially.

How much input does Foxconn have re the design of A BlackBerry device? Or is that to be negotiated in the near future? I hope they just assemble them.

[Omnitech]

I guess it's an important question because they will probably buy the Blackberry smartphone business eventually and use it as their house brand. Blackberry seems to be moving away from the hardware production chain while companies like Lenovo and Foxconn all want to make their own branded products.

This just in: Lenovo has been making their own branded products for about 23 years now.

Stunning analysis.

[kbz1960]

My view? I don't really care who mfg's the phones. There are some on here who do and if past talk of Foxconn while centered on apple is an indication none of them will ever touch a bb phone again.

[Cozz4ever]

Nobody care about the labour in china and now blackberry goes asia with budget and mayby high end models made by foxconn really need 2 new touchscreen phone's with 1,2 and 1,7 ghz processor and one with 4,2 and the other 5 inch screen.

call them
Z4 with 1,2 Ghz processor, 4,2 inch screen no hdmi, no 4G (asia and europe market)
Z5 with 1,7 Ghz processor 5 inch screen , no hdmi ,with 4G (asia and europe market)

Blackberry must sell there phone's with 5 years service plan in Europe, indonesia ,India with means after 2 years you can repair it as first owner
against cost price only.

Sell there own product online at blackberry.com free delivery world wide.

They must make deals against low profit and take stock back from operator to sell the products.

They must visit operators and store's to motivate,promote staff and give away nice prices to win.

They must Also advertise that blackberry 10 is the new touchscreen experience with android runtime inside to run android apps and blackberry apps and still the using the most protected phone secured by blackberry, trend micro or just by your own company. We have the best of all world so what stops you to move to buy blackberry to get you move on in this world. Blackberry 10 the new touchscreen experience.

I'm pretty sure you need to invest in Asian markets if you want to sell there. Ask any car manufacturer and they'll tell you.

Posted via CB10

[qbnkelt]

It was the Chinese locations which were under such scrutiny for poor conditions and suicides and that was a couple of years ago.

If you replay the conference call you'll hear that John Chen specifically says that the new devices will be manufactured in the Mexico Foxconn plants. This makes sense in that it's easier for people from Waterloo to do QA and collaborate if everyone's on the same time zone and there are more or less direct flights from Toronto to Mexico.

If you read this Wiki Foxconn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia you'll see that they're also building the new PS4 as well as several other non-Apple products already.

Same company making same profits supporting practices across the board.

It's like saying apartheid didn't matter because it was in South Africa and it was not the law of the land in the US.

If the argument is based on moral high ground then it is applicable across the board, not compartmentalised and rationalised. I buy Apple products and I will buy the next BlackBerry that appeals to me.

[Omnitech]

Outsourcing is one of those things that in the short term may look good on paper by finance department who were directed to make it look good on paper.

Well that train has already left the station, so you're tilting at windmills.

Hon Hai Precision, dba Foxconn, at the present time manufactures 40% of all electronic device production in the world.

That's not because all those popular brand names are doing it themselves, it's because outsourcing of electronic production has become the standard way of doing things for decades now.

There are very few companies today with the scale to build mass consumer electronic products in-house and actually have a competitive product. Probably 95% or more of the brandnames that are actually on the electronic products being sold to end-users today do not actually have their own production facilities. RIM/BlackBerry themselves has been doing this for many years.

Depending on how the agreement is crafted, 5 years will represent a period short enough that BB can reverse course and take back production.

There is no "taking back production" because BlackBerry was never producing their own hardware anyway.

This means that Foxconn would need to take over management of the current manufacturing operations of BB. BB manufactured in Mexico. I support manufacturing in Mexico.

You of course realize that the factories in Mexico building Blackberries were operated by contract manufacturers, not Blackberry, right?

[sirchocolate]

Is it a good move for BlackBerry? Is the company good or bad? Personally I wouldn't like to support the company because of the way they treat their workers but hey everyone is entitled to their own opinions and everyone's views are different. Post your views below

Posted via CB10

i think it is a bad move.
foxconn is located in china which means low and bad quality.

what a shame.

[DJM626]

Will Black Berry have any input though as of the design of the phones, or is Foxconn going to supply all that? Who will have the final say on what the phone looks like? Reason I am asking is because I have always liked the look of most of the Black Berry phones. Some more then others, and maybe not at first, but they have always seemed to grow on me.

Bottom line for me is I really do not car who manufactures the phones for BB. It is under the hood what counts. As long as they do what they should, and run flawless and there is a great user experience for all that use them, I can only say "Bring them on"

It never ceases to amaze me that some of the people that complain and have made statements about BB should give up and exit the hardware business are some of the same people that will complain or make negative statements when it was announced that Foxconn will be providing the hardware for BB.

You just can't win and no one will ever be happy

[bakron1]

First of all, the average consumer which is about 99% percent of the market does not care where a product is built or by who is building it. They shop for price and value added products. I still look for "Made in USA" products to support my fellow Americans as do allot of my Canadian friends do to support their folks in the workplace. But it's getting harder and harder and harder to find stuff made in your own country.

Forget and worrying about how these companies like Foxconn and the rest of the ones out there who pay their employees nothing and have terrible working conditions. Its about corporate profits and making your numbers in the business world my friends, plain and simple.

I still believe we can produce products in our own countries and still make a profit, maybe not the amount they expect to make, but still enough to pay your employees a decent wage and benefits, but then your couldn't pay those executives the 10 of millions of dollars to make those bad decisions which got you here in the first place, sound familiar?

[Omnitech]

If the argument is based on moral high ground then it is applicable across the board, not compartmentalised and rationalised.

Pity that most of the people that join in on petty crusades against "immoral companies" haven't the foggiest notion what is actually going on, or how they themselves have consistently contributed to it over the course of their entire adult life.

It's like Apple products built in offshore factories in places with pathetic records in terms of committments to labor rights, environmental damage, human rights, political enfranchisement and so on, built with components which directly contribute to suffering around the world in a plethora of ways... and then have the mendacity to package those things in "recycled paperboard" and sanctimoniously print on the outside of the package how it was printed with "renewable soy inks" and other such feel-good claptrap.

The cognitive dissonance is astounding. People by-and-large just want nice easy little compartmentalized spoon-fed faux crusades that they can join in with little personal sacrifice, so they can feel like they're "doing something good" without having to actually do anything.

I went into a beauty products store the other day and asked the young clerk behind the counter about skin moisturizer products. When I pointed out some of the commonly-used animal-sourced ingredients in some of the products, she got this horrified look on her face, obviously oblivious to the fact that commonly-used ingredients listed on stuff in her nice feel-good store that sounded so innocuous, like "siloxane" (derived from shark livers and which contributes to the killing-off of an endangered species) or lanolin (basically, sheep wool grease), were things that squicked her out yet had no idea what they actually were while being right under her nose.

This is typical, in my experience.

Most people don't want to actually learn about such details, they prefer having their faux crusades spoon-fed to them.

[Omnitech]

i think it is a bad move.
foxconn is located in china which means low and bad quality.

LOL.

I rest my case.

Oh and BTW: Foxconn is not a Chinese (PRC) company.

[Omnitech]

Will Black Berry have any input though as of the design of the phones, or is Foxconn going to supply all that? Who will have the final say on what the phone looks like?

I think BlackBerry will have lots of input on those things, and probably complete control of the general overall design. What they will delegate to the OEM/ODM manufacturers will be details like internal mechanical design, circuit-board design, component and materials sourcing to some extent, manufacturing, warehousing and logistics, etc.

At some point, they may license their OS to be bundled with other branded vendor's hardware, and if that comes to pass those "licensees" will have a lot more control over the hardware details that are not critical to compatibility and basic functionality. Similiar to how Google makes sure Android devices pass certain basic compatibility and functionality standards, but does not dictate specific device design to their licensees.

[kbz1960]

i think it is a bad move.
foxconn is located in china which means low and bad quality.

what a shame.

That's funny. I haven't heard too many complaints about iPhone build.