BB cutting 4500 jobs

[Insidious Von]

Greed killed Nortel, hubris is killing BB.

To bad Canada doesn't have a Carl Ichan that could have forced out those two idiots (Lazaridis and Balsille) a long time ago. Once Balsille started playing footsie with Gary Bettman you knew the company was in trouble.

Apple is going through a creativity crisis. Whatever Jobs personality faults were he was a visionary foremost. When he was initially forced out of Apple he didn't sit on his hands, he started another successful company - Pixar.

 

[fuji]

Greed killed Nortel, hubris is killing BB.

To bad Canada doesn't have a Carl Ichan that could have forced out those two idiots (Lazaridis and Balsille) a long time ago. Once Balsille started playing footsie with Gary Bettman you knew the company was in trouble.

He should have just sold his stake early on. Then he could have gone off to play sports mogul, and someone else could have taken care of BlackBerry.

 

[Insidious Von]

There was a time when I could pay my rent from the money I made from Nortel alone. Their executives spent like drunken sailors.

Jim Balsille was too much a doofus to be sports mogul, he thought that his shit smelled like rosewater and didn't want to play by the rules. He didn't have the smarts to be a Jack Kent Cooke.

 

[Playfulfun]

BB has been dead for some time they just forgot to put it in the ground.

 

[eldoguy]

I bought extended warranty on my BB Torch from Best Buy. Last week it crapped out, handed it back and got a I Phone.

 

[highpark]

Thorsten Heins was a disaster too. Good cutter. Absolutely NO vision. To say that iPhone is obsolete white they're eating BlackBerry s lunch. To say that tablets r going nowhere. He looks like an idiot.

 

[Ridgeman08]

Not quite...

Apple is going through a creativity crisis. Whatever Jobs personality faults were he was a visionary foremost. When he was initially forced out of Apple he didn't sit on his hands, he started another successful company - Pixar.

He did not start Pixar... George Lucas did... in 1979, (then called Pixar Image Computer a division of LucasFilm). Jobs bought it from Lucas in 1986...

Jobs, DID start NExt. Another Computer company that he started in 1985 that was later bought by Apple, in 1996, which is how he got back to his old company.

And yes, he WAS the visionary the drove Apple... and now that he's gone, they are DEFINITELY in creative crisis.

 

[NHFL]

.

Steve Jobs sat on 1 board. Apple. And Jobs never took his eye off of Apple and innovating. It has been said that Jobs was a colossal prick, but you cannot argue what he built.

Ballsillie is just a colossal failure.

I suggest you look up Job HEAVY involvement with Pixar and Disney while he was involved with Apple and it's rebirth. I believe he was Pixars chairman and CEO until about 2006 and when Disney bought it went to serve on Disneys board

 

[slowandeasy]

I knew it from the day 1. Bb phones are overpriced and less powerful. The z10 was not bad. However, i hate the boards. Now whats gonna happen to 4500 people?

Unfortunately, the Z10 was at least a year behind when they needed to launch. I was "forced" to get a Z10 when my previous blackberry died. The product has some good qualities, but
it is so temperamental, that if it did not cost me almost $400, I would have stomped on it months ago.

The reason I got it was that my techie friends amped up the rhetoric about the "security" of their network etc... Truthfully, for most of us
the security is not critical. What is critical is when I am driving and trying to easily make a phone call, it never works properly.

I would not say that the phones are overpriced compared to Apple Products.

 

[slowandeasy]

Its not all Balsilly's fault. The execs at BB did not see our understand what was happening in the phone market and how the integration of applications
really outflanked BB's cutting edge technology, and security. Essentially, they fell into the all too common trap that kills companies
"if you build it he will come". It seems to me that the executives sat around an stroked each other's egos that they were the biggest and baddest in the land
who would crush anyone trying to usurp their position. Not looking so good now..

As others have said, its too bad to see another Canadian company lurching in its death throes..

 

[Don]

I had little sympathy for Nortel when it went down. I did business with them in the late 90's and the company got so bloated and arrogant it wasn't even funny. They spent money like water. Hey, I benefited - they treated me like a king when I visited them. But when they were ordering expensive pieces of art to put up in their conference rooms and even junior engineers were demanding dual LCD monitors (this is 90's remember, LCD monitors were still somewhat of a rarity and super expensive) and they had company team building trips every month to some expensive remote location.... you have to wonder that this is not going to end well.

I also did business with RIM years ago. They were nowhere near as bad. But the arrogance was there and their bigger issue was complacency.

I feel bad for Canadian companies and tech when it faced demise because of other factors besides their own doing (Avro Arrow). Not RIM or Nortel

 

[Samurai Joey]

This is really for another thread, but one question we could ask ourselves is whether there will be another high-tech success story in the scale of RIM or Nortel to emerge within Canada.

 

[niveamen]

What really burns me is that they have stockpile of the Z10 and Z10 in a warehouse and are just writing it off. They COULD have just offered it for $300/pop unlocked like Google did with the Nexus 4 and win back market share. Instead, they just took the hit to the shareholders and employees instead. My guess was they did that with the Playbook.. and it was a fiasco. One of the blame I think it putting the company in Waterloo. They are so sheltered from the rest of the world when they are the largest fish in a very small pond. How do they even see the world is over run with iPhones and Galaxies when everyone in Waterloo they interact with is a RIM employee? Yes RIM (BBRY) was stupid and irrelevant ticker change.

Instead of concentrating on making $ with a large amount of cash in their coffers, they should have just concentrated on getting back market share - like how they initially did it when it all began. I think it's a good move to cut 4500 jobs, that just tells me they are too over-bloated with too many layers of management and a lot of useless people just eating away at their cash on hand. Although they should have done it sooner.

Either way, there's nothing in the pipe for blackberry to win back market share, their one and only "asset" is BBM, and they can't even give it away (well they can, just they don't know how LOL). So what do they have left? Moving to the corporate world is a good move, but seems like too little too late. May as well downsize as much as they can, make it a startup again and go from there.

I agree with most people here, it's sad to see another Canadian tech company go irrelevent. At least another Canadian tech companies makes a good MBA case study on how not to run a successful company.

 

[niveamen]

That's gonna swamp the Toronto IT labour market with a lot of talented people.

Good time to be an IT manager trying to hire.

Not such a good time to be an IT person seeking work.

I would be cautious hiring a Waterloo grad that has only worked at RIM, did nothing (well not blaming the employee), with a sense of entitlement, overpaid and an over-inflated ego. If they were talented they would a) wouldn't have released such crappy products for past 5 years b) chosen to work in Waterloo!

Being devil's advocate here - but I much rather hire a kid who's worked in a small business and knows what it takes to get the job done without bureaucracy.

But you're right; it's going to swamp the job market. No matter how you look at it. Just makes it going through those resumes that much longer!

 

[elmo]

The guys running the company were more interested in hockey than technology.

True but they did fine.

 

[fuji]

True but they did fine.

It doesn't look like they did fine.

It looks like when the money was rolling in they took their eye off the ball and made several fatal strategic blunders.

 

[George The Curious]

They should just donate whatever cash left to charity instead of futile attempt to save the company.

 

[elmo]

It doesn't look like they did fine.

It looks like when the money was rolling in they took their eye off the ball and made several fatal strategic blunders.

Personally they did fine

 

[fuji]

Personally they did fine

Oh I see. You are rooting for Android or Apple. That's why you think it is "fine" that they had a closed and hostile attitude towards app writers, refused to develop an eco system around the core hardware, messaging, and security technology, and ignored the all importance of the consumer market desire for entertainment like games and movies.

 

[elmo]

Oh I see. You are rooting for Android or Apple. That's why you think it is "fine" that they had a closed and hostile attitude towards app writers, refused to develop an eco system around the core hardware, messaging, and security technology, and ignored the all importance of the consumer market desire for entertainment like games and movies.

How big is your ass that it has all this stuff in it for whenever you want to pull it out? All of the above (your words not mine) are business decisions they took, right or wrong, that made them a lot of money. Yeah, they did fine.