Originally Posted by
sentimentGX4 The article actually does have a valid point about the company lacking direction with its current product line: BBM for teenagers, Q20 for enterprise, Z3 for developing world consumers, etc. etc.
Despite all the talk about focusing on businesses/"prosumers", the only difference between Blackberry's current target demographic and the former target demographic that I can discern is that Blackberry is no longer focusing on developed nation consumers.
And it should be noted that lost of focus doesn't even appear so much the decision of Blackberry. Blackberry products were expelled from carriers, which no longer want to deal with product busts like the Z10 or Q10.
It really isn't about vision, and so far Chen has presented NONE at all, but I wouldn't expect him to, as there is no clear avenue for a BB miracle at the moment. People at CB hear some vague rhetoric "prosumers", "mobile computing"....what have you....dream up their own ridiculous vision of it - which doesn't even match other fanboy versions. Take the 10 most extreme fanboys here, and ask them EXACTLY what the plan is, the direction, the products...and you'll get different answers, yet all will agree that the path is clear, that Chen is "moving forward", making "all the right moves", EXACTLY as he should, and that if you can't see that, you're blind, wrong, brainwashed, and can't see that BB is poised to the be biggest company in mobile.
Well, he is making the right move, which is basically pursuing any avenue that appears to have any viability (which the company still has the resources to pursue). He'll see if anything sticks, hope some thing(s) do, and eject the rest. Right now, this is limited to: try to salvage BES, and a small business market, try to sell cheap phones to developing nations, float the idea of more qwerty, see if BBM can gain traction, keep QNX going (the healthiest, but unfortunately very small, part of BB) and keep cutting costs. The truth is, without a huge backer, this is all he can do at the moment. You can call it grasping at staws, being opportunistic, or anything else - it's the same thing at this point.