I'd say they're circling the drain...

BlackBerry to Cut 40% of Work Force After Big Loss


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/technology/blackberry-plans-to-cut-4500-jobs.html

I did a little happy dance when my employer dumped Blackberry for Android. I work for an organization that has at least 2,500 company issued phones so this was a big deal.

They still have quite a few gov't contracts, although that will probably be done in just a few years.

didn't they loose out to IOS running unix / apple by trying to make a custom system that supported only their own apps for particular hw ?

they are selling multi-level securty units, as obama phones, for gov workers. but so are the russians.

really android is freeware. i can make a new brand and release if china doesn't hang up the phone on me. but i know they will - first they ask if i work for microsoft when i say no - they hang up the phone

sounds like a sure path to success

anybody makes money that way! anybody!

Tough One Wrote:
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> They still have quite a few gov't contracts,
> although that will probably be done in just a few
> years.


I dunno, the older Bold and Curve even the new ones are really the best phones for business. An Iphone is more for the extra apps and everything else than anything and not many phones offer a hard keypad anymore. The touch screen typing is slower and really doesnt appeal to a strickly business side. Theyve definitely had their problems in the private sales market, but no one else is really gearing anything towards strictly business at the moment and their email being like a text message is still the best.

I think the iphone is finally offering the enterprise management that companies need in order to meet IT security guidlines (mostly this means, remote wipe). Apple doesn't seem to care about the niche business market.

Yeah, nobody in their right mind would buy a Blackberry. The only reason they're still in business is that there are so many people who aren't in their right mind.

BlackBerry made a bunch of strategic blunders over the past 5 years. They owned the enterprise/corp/gov't market and they've in large part forfeited it. What little consumer share they had is long, long gone.

It's sort of similar to Microsoft, which, hard as it may be to believe today, once had a plurality marketshare of the mobile phone world (Windows Mobile had over 40% marketshare in 2007, the other 60 was split between Palm and BlackBerry).

The difference is that Microsoft has a shitload of cash to try to rectify their mistakes and BlackBerry well...doesn't.

I don't see any real future for them.

RoadMusings_ Wrote:
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> BlackBerry made a bunch of strategic blunders over
> the past 5 years. They owned the
> enterprise/corp/gov't market and they've in large
> part forfeited it. What little consumer share they
> had is long, long gone.
>
> It's sort of similar to Microsoft, which, hard as
> it may be to believe today, once had a plurality
> marketshare of the mobile phone world (Windows
> Mobile had over 40% marketshare in 2007, the other
> 60 was split between Palm and BlackBerry).
>
> The difference is that Microsoft has a shitload of
> cash to try to rectify their mistakes and
> BlackBerry well...doesn't.
>
> I don't see any real future for them.


Yep, they choked. Sat back for too long thinking that their push mail and the rest would be enough to keep them on top on the business side and didn't appreciate how much of a shift was coming with Apple and Androids app markets and ubiquitous touch as the model. By the time that they did it was too late and they weren't big enough to compete especially starting from scratch. Had they kept up they may have been able to but even that would have been a trick versus Apple and Google.

Kind of reminds me of Palm. They were huge and pretty much owned that entire market. Until they got lazy and you say the bigger fish Microsoft started to eat them. Then when HP took over they were doomed to certain obscurity as HP does so well with most all of the companies that they buy.

Microsoft should just stick to their core markets, Windows, Xbox, etc. Does anyone buy Office for Mac?

Blackberry is to phones what AOL is to the internet.

eesh Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Microsoft should just stick to their core markets,
> Windows, Xbox, etc. Does anyone buy Office for
> Mac?


If they paid more attention to Windows, Windows 8 would have never happened.

eesh Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Microsoft should just stick to their core markets,
> Windows, Xbox, etc. Does anyone buy Office for
> Mac?

My employer does. I switched to a Mac at work when they originally gave me a POS Dell laptop and wouldn't let me "downgrade" to an older Thinkpad.

Office Mac kinda/sorta works with sharepoint sometimes.

http://www.realclear.com/news/2013/09/23/blackberry_agrees_to_47_billion_buyout_3247.html

"BlackBerry announced Monday it has agreed to a $4.7 billion buyout by a consortium of investors who plan to take the struggling Canadian smartphone maker private."

The turd shall live on.

wnrsm Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> eesh Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Microsoft should just stick to their core
> markets,
> > Windows, Xbox, etc. Does anyone buy Office for
> > Mac?
>
> My employer does. I switched to a Mac at work
> when they originally gave me a POS Dell laptop and
> wouldn't let me "downgrade" to an older Thinkpad.
>
> Office Mac kinda/sorta works with sharepoint
> sometimes.

Office for Mac actually has a decent user share. The Macintosh Business Unit (MBU), which is the group inside Microsoft which produces the Mac products is rather weird in that it has a large degree of functional independence from the rest of the company (Mac Office releases have had somewhat different UI's, the program names have been different - see Entourage vs Outlook, and the underlying software architectures are often completely different. For example, when Microsoft used to produce a version of Internet Explorer for the Mac, the code underneath it was a completely different rendering engine known as Talisman which was actually much more advanced than the Trident code Microsoft was using for Windows IE).

As for Microsoft's strategy, Steve Ballmer has been an unmitigated disaster. Which comes from the fact that he's not a vision or tech guy at all. He's a manager - a business dude. He was fine as a #2 under Gates. He sucks as #1. Over the past 10 years (referred to as the "lost decade" for Microsoft), the company has consistently repeated the pattern of seeing the future, being ahead of time, and yet managing to fall behind. Tablets, phones, etc. More recently they've screwed over a lot of folks trying to play catch up (see Windows 8). Fortunately the people responsible for alot of those decisions are gone or leaving. Whether they now "get it" remains to be seen.

wnrsm Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> http://www.realclear.com/news/2013/09/23/blackberr
> y_agrees_to_47_billion_buyout_3247.html
>
> "BlackBerry announced Monday it has agreed to a
> $4.7 billion buyout by a consortium of investors
> who plan to take the struggling Canadian
> smartphone maker private."
>
> The turd shall live on.


Eh... probably not. They bought it mostly for the IP I think. No way that a company like Fairfax is going to make the necessary investment to keep them in the game in any significant way. They'll milk it for the existing contracts while spinning off what they can.

Undoubtedly an IP move. Time for the lawyers to start looking harder at the big money phone rivals. Surely someone is infringing on a Blackberry patent somewhere.

I thought this thread was about the Redskins.