I remember reading articles when windows 7 was being developed early on and a high up executive, Alchin I think, went to Ballmer and said that an incremental update, like they had been doing their whole history, adding to the same core code was not going to work and he made the case to rewrite the entire OS from scratch after the first iteration of windows 7 was already in development- staked his career on it, hence the windows 7 we have now and also hence the 5 year window between XP and windows 7. MS was obviously in a better place. No competitors offering newer PC OS's so where could we go if we wanted to upgrade the old and tired XP?
Rim is at the same place of transitioning. Someone there made the decision last year they could not release just a warmed over version of the same damn phone. The CEO's listened or maybe it was their idea and hence the QNX architecture change and also the moving to basically one platform architecture for all phones.
So, we have the new phones hitting in a few weeks. While they are not the dual core blah blah blah. They are for all intents and purposes miles ahead of even the 9700, which I have. Then a short cycle to the QNX phones and cant wait to see the playbook features once the phones are running the same OS. So Rim is not down or out. A lot of the negativity is I imagine being done by Rims competitors, because they can see the transition Rim is in and how much stronger they will be when they get to the other side. QNX has unlimited potential and that damn OS is in everything.
We cant think of anything they haven't. They knew and projected revenue loss from not selling phones, loss of customers jumping to chase the next shiny object, the negative press, the stock price decline, the canadian dollar at par with the US dollar and they said, this will be cheaper and better in the long run than the same old same old. So lets make are shift now.
So Rim took a temporary short lasting hit by not releasing new phones for a while. The employees they let go. Happy to see it. They probably were not getting on board with the new direction. Rim has lots of cash and can hire as many developers as they need and of course merging everything and not supporting the other stuff, would let you consolidate your development teams. It was probably the OS4.0 guys

) Look at all the things that have been released in the last few days with the software and tools. I for one am happy to see them in this sort of negative position. It means they pulled their head out of their *** and are marching forward. And we all know we will be feasting on our new blackberrys in a few weeks and I think with the power and memory, the hourglass will never be seen again and we will have forgotten that we went over a year without new toys. That will tide us over until the QNX phones. Well, its my 2 cents anyways and I will shell out the 500.00 or so for the 9900 and wont be worried about it one bit.