RIM's Heins: BlackBerry-maker not 'in a death spiral'
Summary: The new chief executive of Research in Motion defends his company, despite, well, everything.
You've got to give it to Thorsten Heins: he's certainly trying.
The new Research in Motion CEO said during a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. radio interview that the mobile company best known for its once-ubiquitous BlackBerry device has come a long way since he took office.
"There's nothing wrong with the company as it exists right now," he said on the Toronto-based program Metro Morning.
He added: "I'm not talking about the company as I, kind of, took it over six months ago. I'm talking about the company [in the] state it's in right now."
That's certainly a tough pill to swallow for industry watchers after the company posted huge first-quarter losses and delays to its BlackBerry 10 operating system, which is supposed to help turn the company's fortunes around.
The OS is now slated for next year.
"This company is not ignoring the world out there, nor is it in a death spiral," he said.
To be fair, Heins wasn't exactly tin-eared to the company's situation, calling RIM "very, very challenged" in the U.S. market. But with little evidence of the success of the changes he's made, Heins's greatest role yet may not be saving the company, but convincing the rest of the industry that it can be done in the first place.
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Talkback
Well duh
He's delusional!
Nothing wrong with being in the position it is and still having to delay
A point to consider...
Apple then, RIM now - the parallels are not exact
Lazaridis and Balsillie founded RIM and brought it to the height of its power, but they ran out of new ideas before they were completely overtaken by Apple and Google.
Apple then, and RIM now, still have a some cash on hand to sustain corporate triage. But two decades ago Apple also had the backing of Microsoft and Adobe to keep their popular software running on the Mac OS. Much less can be said today of the developer support behind the Blackberry ecosystem.
Things are much direr for RIM now then for Apple back in those days. We'll just have to see how the guys in Waterloo hold out until BB10 next spring.
RIM's Heins: BlackBerry-maker not 'in a death spiral'
just wait for a while, apple is slowly dying. any company that start litigating to protect itself speaks a lot of its future direction and internal competence. they may have cash cows now, but like sco and rim, they are getting distracted and sooner than later completely bungled and lost direction. apple had macintosh, sun had sparc, rca had tubes, fairchild had ics, et al. all had cash cows, but lost directions and failed. lucky for your beloved apple, the investors put all their lots in jobs when the going got rough... and he got lucky! sun should have bought apple in those turbulent days? newton anyone? don't laugh at jobs' failure (he can see further ahead than most of us), he had a knack to prove his detractors are bunch of loonies. do apple have another jobs amongst the apple hierarchy?