BlackBerry lost at sea
by Volker Weber
WATERLOO, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - Aug. 12, 2013) - BlackBerry Limited ... today announced that the Company's Board of Directors has formed a Special Committee to explore strategic alternatives to enhance value and increase scale in order to accelerate BlackBerry 10 deployment. These alternatives could include, among others, possible joint ventures, strategic partnerships or alliances, a sale of the Company or other possible transactions.
You form a committee when you run out of options. BlackBerry 10 is great, but sales are not. I mean, this is it. The Z10 and the Q10 are the best that BlackBerry can make. If you can't get people excited about those, what can you do?
Cross-platform BBM is two years late. WhatsApp owns this space and has one-upped the competition with push-to-talk. Cross-platform device management is also late. Once people have deployed MDM for iOS and Android, you are not getting them back. It would mean collecting all devices and rolling them out from scratch.
The game isn't over. Announcing this committee is not a good sign though.
Comments
BlackBerry 10 looks really good but once you're heading downhill it's really difficult to stop the momentum. Like another product I've always held in great affection, once people decide they don't want it...
All correct and I can add :
- handed a Q10 to two senior execs in the last weeks. Both came back : not intuitive, unpractical, where are the buttons ? When I need a manual for a Blackberry - I do not want the phone.
- MDM from Blackberry was "mediocre" when they released it and this was the time all conpetitors won the customers - including us
I forgot : One of the senior execs is now a happy camper with his Lumia 820
Neither is putting yourself up for sale an encouraging sign...
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/12/blackberry-for-sale-smartphone-market
Corus, the merged Dutch steelmaker Koninklijke Hoogovens and British Steel, put itself up for sale in 2007 to overcome structural problems, and that went quite well.
Maybe Bin Laden industries will branch out and purchase RIM/Blackberry. It would almost be worth it to see the NSA barf.
