“Research in Motion said today it is planning to cut 2000 jobs as part of a cost optimization program. The company gave other additional details on the program as well, which it first announced in June. The changes are aimed at creating greater alignment of the organization, and streamlining its operations to better position the company for future growth and profitability.”
Alignment of the org and streamlining is so boilerplate Today, I could have written their release statement from memory of failed companies past.
Business people running tech companies eventually leads to failed businesses. I feel for those employees and no amount of goodwill as in a severance package for them will help RIM from this.
Having anyone BUT business people run tech companies would be a fatal mistake. There are incompetent, short-sighted business people just as there are incompetent, short-sighted engineers. The trick is to get the good business people to run the company and the good engineers doing engineering.
In short: Engineer run companies create products, but do not create a business. Business people run companies create business, but fail on products.
That is not what he said … you need synergy of both engineering and business smarts to succeed.
Edited 2011-07-26 15:26 UTC
There may have been a boolean algebra problem, but we got the gist from what he said.
Almost every new model launched since (and starting with) the Storm has been a total disaster (my POV of course).
Once upon a time, they did one thing and did it right: the working man/woman smartphone, with a half-sized screen and a full keyboard.
They had the best usability, a well designed OS, very good battery life, enterprise integration software and so on.
Then competition caught back, teenagers started loving BBs, RIM set on this new target and they went off track.
To use a BB device on an Exchange infrastructure , you need BES, or if on BIS, BES Express or third party yearly licensed apps on the BB client.
WebOS, Android, and WinMO along with supporting wireless PIM from google, yahoo, etc also do activesync …for free.
RIM needs to support activesync on BIS for free and kill off those third parties for their own good. Also, it costs on average $10 or more to use a Blackberry on the same big 3 cell providers. There is no differentiator with BIS except that it costs more per month for the consumer. BES still has a place.
BES Express is free, so the price is not an issue on the infrastructure side.
Except that you indeed need dedicated server software+hardware, and that BESX requirements are outrageously high.
As for the carriers charging for not blocking BlackBerry traffic, there’s not much that RIM can do about it.
It’s a nasty business, but that’s how mobile telephony works today, and not likely to change in the short term.
Specifically you need a Windows server license to run BESX. If I could run BESX on RHEL or CentOS, I would have a BESX server and a Blackberry right now.
I investigated setting up a BESX server for the Blackberry users in the company, but we’re not going to buy a Win Serv license when we’re already paying for the Active Sync feature in Zimbra.
There is already the BlackBerry Express server, which offers the most common features of BES for free. It also works on a BIS subscription.
Besides, most companies don’t choose BES for the sync features only, but also for the strong encryption features, and the very detailed policy settings you can push to BB devices (I don’t know how much exactly, but it seems there are over 100 different settings you can manage).
Yet, without a need for BES or BES Express to be added to Exchange, all the other phone providers are able to do activesync directly and those devices cost less per month.
I see your point about the lots of other features that are allowed to be set through BES(x). With standard activesync, there is remote wipe plus maybe only a handful of others. That could be enough to allow the CEO to whisper to the CTO to tell the CISO to rewrite the policy and allow the iPhones of the world on the network.
Edited 2011-07-26 16:43 UTC
Torch is a pretty good device that marries touchscreen to physical slider pretty well.
Biggest problem with the latest models is that for whatever reason RIM continued to try and milk as much mileage as possible out of underpowered Marvell platform.
It’s harder to create a high-powered “fun” consumer app on BB and Symbian for that matter to compete with the bouncy and responsive UIs on iPhone and Android devices when they have the hardware power to make alot of things seem “easy”. That has changed alot in OS6 so there are comparable APIs and the OS makes better use of the underlying hardware, openVG acceleration, etc.
I don’t think it’s the wrong track to compete in multiple market segments, they just didn’t want to properly invest in R&D to make it happen. Went for churn, churn, churn and then tried to catch up via merger and acquisition. Doesn’t work very well.
They could market QNX for desktop usage like OSX but with a much open source involvement (more reliance on Pkgsrc & friends) on commodity hardware. But they didn’t.
Bad for them.
Yeah, that would have saved them.
Um, what?!?
Take a ton more work to make QNX into a marketable desktop OS than into a IVI or smartphone OS. And do you really think there’s any room at all in the consumer mindspace for yet another desktop OS?
Could be argued legitimately with Android/iOS that there is very little interest among consumers for any more choices in the smartphone space. Meego is basically DOA, WP7 has less market share than Bada, WebOS is niche for one more release than probably dead unless HP can figure a way to give it mass-market consumer appeal that doesn’t involve rebating it to death.
Some people say only hope for RIM is to pull a Nokia (which I grudgingly refer to as pull an Elop) and become essentially a hardware OEM and fully embrace Android but tbh, they aren’t exactly innovative on hardware. Software is their differentiation, succeed or fail. Who knows what the future holds though.
Sucks for the workers in any case. Basically no real management accountability by the Board here, no real restructuring, just some shuffling of names, and alot of unemployed workers.
Sucks.
No, it doesn’t take a lot of work to make qnx a desktop os.
Your way of thinking of what is a desktop os makes you think it’s difficult.
I’ll give you a hint – your phone/tablet IS your desktop.
The posting should have been “Plans to cut 2000 RIM Jobs.”