http://forums.crackberry.com/news-ru...erryos-877917/
I don't generally start threads here, and I debated whether to start this one, especially given the topic, which I know isn't going to be received with open arms by many Crackberrians. Still, I think it needs to be said.
BB eliminated the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Chief Operations Officer (COO) positions today. They didn't just fire the folks in those positions, they
dissolved those positions. Think about that for a second: they no longer feel that Marketing and Operations divisions are important enough to be led by a C-suite-level position. How is that possible if they plan to continue to be in the hardware business? In my opinion, it isn't.
Instead, I see this as yet another strong piece of evidence that BB does not plan to be in the hardware business going forward, and in fact has ALREADY exited the market. Let's look at the reasons why I believe that is true:
- Massive losses in hardware, with nearly $2 billion in write-downs over the last couple of years, between the Playbook and the Z10.
- Continued bleeding of marketshare, and particularly low sales of BB10 devices (BBOS has outsold BB10 each quarter, by a wide margin).
- At the end of September, BB canceled its contract with the OEM manufacturer, Jabil Circuit, who actually made the BB handsets, leaving them without a manufacturing partner.
- John Chen's repeated statements about focusing on software and services going forward, and refusing to outright deny that BB was exiting the hardware business (it makes sense not to do so while they still have existing inventory to sell).
- And now, eliminating the CMO and COO positions entirely.
In the face of all of that evidence, I don't see how anyone can believe that hardware is in BB's (near) future.
I don't believe that BB is going to cease to exist, mind you. Rather, I see BB pretty quickly becoming a sub-1000-person software company (maybe closer to 500 employees, total), focusing on QNX, XBBM, and BES/MDM. It's also possible that one or more of these lines of business may be spun off into a separate company. Clearly, there is value in these areas and potential for profits, but BB's days as a company that makes billions in revenue and competes in the smartphone market are, IMO, clearly over, at least for the foreseeable future.
Could they jump back in 5 years down the road? Who knows? Maybe HTML6 (7? 8?) will have made native apps truly obsolete, and the smartphone OS world will be broken wide open again, with lots of new competition. For the current cycle, though, BB took WAY too long to take multi-touch, web, media, and app-enabled smartphones seriously, and by the time they made a real effort to get back into the game, it was too little and WAY too late. 95+% of the blame for that rests with Mike and Jim, without a doubt. Thorsten was obviously not the right guy for the CEO job, but to be fair, his task was nearly impossible to begin with, due to the situation Mike and Jim left him with.
I get that this is a BB fan site, and this post isn't going to be popular, but can anyone really say it's not
realistic? Is there any real, substantial evidence that points in the other direction?