“BlackBerry offered few signs of a long-promised turnaround on Friday, with an unexpected quarterly operating loss, a dearth of details on sales of its make-or-break new line of devices and no return to profit expected in the current quarter. BlackBerry shares tumbled about 28 percent in both U.S. and Toronto trading.” ‘Unexpected’? Really?
BlackBerry has some serious issues with following through on their commitments.
I have been waiting patiently for BB10 for Playbook so I can finally attempt to use that thing again – and today I read they have officially killed that project:
http://crackberry.com/blackberry-announces-bb10-not-coming-playbook
For months now, people have been clamoring for the promised release of BB10 on the playbook – with lots of skepticism that BB would ever follow through.
I guess the skeptics were right – they didn’t.
This company is clearly fucked up internally.
Now I wish they would unlock the playbook so someone could port Android to it – otherwise this thing will ultimately become a brick.
That’s some sad news. I was considering getting one once BB10 was released.
Another one bites the dust?
They did not build trust on the platform by not open sourcing QNX for the PC. So why should someone buy their product? Ask the BB users if they know what QNX is.
The number of people who cares about that doesn’t nearly number enough to make even an impact on RIM’s sales figures.
RIM is failing because they got complacent and thought their days as the big cheese would last forever without them making any efforts.
Thing is Z10, Q10 and Q5 are now where for how long on sail? Question is how it will look like in the next quarter when one full quarter available. Then it should be long enough around to judge if its failing or ‘good enough’ stopping the RIM downfall and increasing market share again.
Edited 2013-06-29 07:52 UTC
It likely won’t look much better, but it doesn’t have to.
They have a good amount of cash to get them through more than a few quarters of relatively minor losses, so they’ll be able to fully execute their plan over many quarters while they restructure/refocus.
Their losses were $60 million if you take out restructuring costs, and revenues+sales were up sequentially and year over year.
2.7 million out of the gate is a respectable figure given that the device line up isn’t fully fleshed out yet, and the ecosystem is just getting started.
My only long term worry is about the cost of bootstrapping an ecosystem. This isn’t easy or cheap. They will need to figure something out.
In the mean time, BB needs to transition into a services role and extract revenue from their competitors to subsidize their BB10 efforts.
The CEO is a smart guy in my opinion, and I’m not exactly ready to count them out just yet. I’m interested in seeing how the rest of this year plays out.
Yeah, because open sourcing really proved successful for Openmoko, Nokia (et al) who supported MeeGo (and not to mention all the other MeeGo variants that preceded it), HP with Open webOS, nor that Linux powered tablet that was released about a month before the original iPad.
Yet the one open source platform that has succeeded (Android) is the least open of all the Linux mobile OSs to date.
That should be evidence enough that 99.99% of consumers couldn’t give a rats arse if the source is open or closed. Heck, even I don’t care and I’m a Linux developer (the need for a stable and reliable handset outweighs my desire to tinker with my phones internals)
Back to stalking AMD share price.
Z10 and Q10 just launched. The devices are seriously very good, and my experience with them has been positive.
Thanks to the Playbook and Blackberry funding developers and giving them free hardware, there is plenty of apps, plus you can sideload many Android apps to different success levels.
Not supporting the Playbook anymore is a big, big mistake, though.. plenty of developers invested time on it (they gave them away for free at GDC) and this is ungrateful to them, it’s like saying “Thank you, but we don’t need you anymore guys”.
A shame. I think the Q10 is one of the best devices on the market build-wise, and its hardware keyboard fills a need only offered on one other current smartphone (Galaxy Chat). I get a feeling the new BlackBerry devices will end up in the same category as the Palm Pixi and Nokia E7 through N9…great devices that were a bit too late to the party to save their parent company.
And some of those with a bit underwhelming OS, as shipping…
And this is why most wannabe contenders must gain trust from developers to be worth their time outside iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
A similar example happend when Nokia announced around November that Qt only APIs would be the way forward for Symbian and Maemo, for fourth months later to kill everyone’s trust with the move to Windows Phone 7.
Episodes like this won’t won’t make many friends.
No one trusts Windows Phone, it already failed. My company does development for quite large and known companies. When WP8 came out, they were all crazy for supporting it. A few months later it’s like it doesn’t even exist. Microsoft will really have to do a LOT of work to reverse this situation.
Games studios do, that is the only type of apps I care about.
However you are right, I am currently pissed off with the MSVC++ 2012 out-of-band updates vs MSVC++ 2013 story, although my employer still uses MSVC++ 2010.
I agree as a whole for Visual Studio. The downside of these fast paced yearly updates is just how much Visual Studio costs, and the startling realization that VS doesn’t offer upgrade pricing.
I think the solution to this is simple and I’m surprised there’s not much movement in this area: We need Visual Studio 365.
Give me a subscription based (and cloud enabled) Visual Studio IDE. That way I can keep up with the fast pace of innovation in a financially sensible manner, Microsoft gets recurring income, and it moves them closer to their Device&Services goal.
I did think the VS2013 stuff was mindblowing though, specifically for XAML devs.
I want my developer tools on my desktop, I will never buy into SaaS tooling.
Well, it depends how the service would work. If they structure it like a cheaper alternative to an MSDN subscription, then it is still is a subscription based service with actual ownership.
There needs to be a solution given the rapid release cycle they’ve shifted into or people will be paying through the nose for Visual Studio.
I’m personally not opposed to paying a yearly fee to ensure I don’t have to drop hundreds of dollars a year.
I’ll never trust a developer moaning about the cost of an IDE. If you aren’t capable enough as a developer and as a business person to be able to afford relatively cheap software (even if it is on an annual basis), I have no reason to believe you are capable of producing quality software.
Given that Visual Studio licenses cost between $700 and $12 000, unless you are a Microsoft partner, then I think it is only fair for developers to complain if they are now expected to buy a new version per year.
Replying to myself as edit is no longer possible, Herb Sutter made some clarifications about the whole issue regarding updates and MSVC++2013.
http://herbsutter.com/2013/06/26/my-build-talk-on-friday-noon-pdt-w…
It’s sad to see Blackberry fade away. Their best case scenario at this point, I think, is simply that they keep their business users and stay alive in that niche. No chance of taking on Apply and Google/Android at this point. It would have been nice if they could have hung in there so that we would have 3 big systems to choose from, rather than only 2.
Windows Phone will almost certainly be the third, MS has enough will and money to make it happen…