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BlackBerry to cut up to 40 percent of employees

arstechnica.com

21–30 of 37 posts

Re: BlackBerry to cut up to 40 percent of employees

#21

BlackBerry still rules in some markets. The BlackBerry Babes would not approve of these layoffs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lDJGHCX2wA

The Objectification Police would not approve of the Blackberry Babes. And people wonder why these industries have a gender imbalance...

BlackBerry Babes is a mainstream movie in Nigeria. The object of their fascination may be BlackBerries (rather than handbags), but that has no connection to sexism within the technology industry.

Re: BlackBerry to cut up to 40 percent of employees

#22

BlackBerry really sucks at marketing this, but BlackBerry 10 is a brand new product . Whatever you may remember about old legacy BlackBerry, throw it out. This is a new OS built upon QNX, new hardware, and a new company. That said, this sucks for those involved, but it's all a part of the company's reinvention.

Which means that developers are forced to learn something new to continue. Now they choose -- they can learn QNX and develop for Blackberrys, with their meager userbase. Or they can learn Java and develop for Androids and their very large userbase. Or they can learn Objective-C and develop for iOS and their deep-pocketed userbase. Edit: or learn...C# && .net?.. and develop for Windows Phone, which just went through t…

If Microsoft wants to play seriously in mobile they need to stick to their roots. By that I mean leverage their superior position in the PC space down through tablets and then into phones. If they can make it so people want to port Windows applications to the tablet space and use them there, they'll come out pretty good.

Re: BlackBerry to cut up to 40 percent of employees

#23
I have a feeling that this number will be revisited within 6 month of the first round. In this business, when it pours, the fact that they are reorganizing will cost them sales as everyone wants to be on the winner platform.

their stock chart over the years: http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=BBRY+Interactive#symbol=b...

Re: BlackBerry to cut up to 40 percent of employees

#24
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which means that developers are forced to learn something new to continue. Now they choose -- they can learn QNX and develop for Blackberrys, with their meager userbase. Or they can learn Java and develop for Androids and their very large userbase. Or they can learn Objective-C and develop for iOS and their deep-pocketed userbase. Edit: or learn...C# && .net?.. and develop for Windows Phone, which just went through t…

If Microsoft wants to play seriously in mobile they need to stick to their roots. By that I mean leverage their superior position in the PC space down through tablets and then into phones. If they can make it so people want to port Windows applications to the tablet space and use them there, they'll come out pretty good.

While this sounds good in powerpoint, it doesn't work out so well in practice...especially when they had a beloved platform in WinMo and dumped it for Windows Phone.

And what about leveraging their superior position in the console market? Why not try to move into gaming tablets, then gaming phones?

Re: BlackBerry to cut up to 40 percent of employees

#25

BlackBerry really sucks at marketing this, but BlackBerry 10 is a brand new product . Whatever you may remember about old legacy BlackBerry, throw it out. This is a new OS built upon QNX, new hardware, and a new company. That said, this sucks for those involved, but it's all a part of the company's reinvention.

Great, it's a "brand new product" which carries along wiht it "brand new broken parts."

I spent a chunk of time this evening trying to get a long-term dedicated BlackBerry user's new Q10 to sync with her Exchange account using ActiveSync. She's the only BB user (and the owner) of her small company, and she has horrible email habits - her inbox makes me cry.

After trying a variety of things and confirming that the phone was establishing a connection (folder list present, able to send messages, no messages ever downloaded), we escalated to the carrier, then on to BlackBerry, then to 2nd-tier, where we found out about a part of the ActiveSync standard that limits requests to 200 items. Turns out that MS didn't enforce that until newer versions/updates of Exchange, so BlackBerry's developers have this but have provided no estimate for a fix (presumably they ignored this in the past since it wasn't enforced). The person we spoke with didn't disagree when I said "so this is probably a 10.2 item?"

The options: BES perhaps? "Have you considered using IMAP?" The user is thinking about whether to trim her inbox to less than 200 items for an initial sync, but I have my doubts about that and in any case she has more than 200 contacts and wants those synced as well. Personally, I think she's going to be returning the device before the end of the week instead and looking at the (few) Android phones with physical keyboards, her killer feature.

Re: BlackBerry to cut up to 40 percent of employees

#28
post #19

RIM used to make it all - the best expensive mobile hardware, low-price decent mobile hardware, the fastest messaging server, a free but slower alternative, the most secure encryption, good mobile OS, the best mobile-to-mobile messaging service, and a solid network. What happened? Apple came in with better expensive hardware and a better OS Google came in with a better (free) OS Many other companies came out with bet…

All your points can be boiled down to a single point: They didn't take competition seriously until it was too late. Same can be said about Nokia and probably in the not too distant future it will be Microsoft.

I think Microsoft has a better chance of creating a more sustainable ecosystem, especially when it comes to having a seamless personal and enterprise experience. I'm talking 3-5 years down the line here.

Meanwhile, I'd be more worried if I were Apple. It will be hard for them to keep-up with the innovation. Especially since there is a flood of new OSes coming like Ubuntu, Tizen, Firefox and more flexible HW platforms.

Re: BlackBerry to cut up to 40 percent of employees

#29
Does anybody find it odd that the only reputable shred of journalistic integrity that the wall street journal vomited into this entire article was in a FOOTNOTE about how blackberry's Z30 was just released today, of all days!

Since when has 'people familiar with the matter' become a reputable source for such an inane accusation? Now the entire internet is repeating this like a bunch of parrots yet nobody seems to stop and ask for facts?

I wouldn't be surprised if Dow Jones is happy. Let's stop and consider who owns the Wall Street Journal for a moment. Because I think their pagerank just went through the roof:

http://money.cnn.com/data/markets/dow/

I'm not sure what to say about this.

Re: BlackBerry to cut up to 40 percent of employees

#30
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Microsoft wants to play seriously in mobile they need to stick to their roots. By that I mean leverage their superior position in the PC space down through tablets and then into phones. If they can make it so people want to port Windows applications to the tablet space and use them there, they'll come out pretty good.

While this sounds good in powerpoint, it doesn't work out so well in practice...especially when they had a beloved platform in WinMo and dumped it for Windows Phone. And what about leveraging their superior position in the console market? Why not try to move into gaming tablets, then gaming phones?

beloved? A number of people I knew, including myself, were going for the Windows mobile 5 and 6 phones in that 2005-2007 period (those years may be slightly askew, but generally before everyone had an iPhone or Android device). The device specs were good, the phones had all the features, I bought Missing Sync to make it work well with my Mac; It all should've been smooth sailing.

But it just didn't work well. Email would quite often need to be reconfigured, it was awful at renegotiating connections and hopping from tower to tower, that one update (from Samsung or MS) that wouldn't turn off GPS correctly when you left the application that was using it, killing your battery in a few hours.. The list droned on.

Taken on their own it wasn't the end of the world but put together it felt like that frankenstein PC you have running in the basement that you didn't have a power switch lying around for and turn on by touching a screwdriver to the motherboard.

Maybe it was ahead of its time, maybe the OEM's just weren't paying enough attention, maybe Microsoft was trying to hard by including a start button and awful stylus. All I know is that damn near everyone I encountered with one of those phones was seeing people with Blackberries working as advertised and becoming very jealous. Add iPhone/Android in a few years and MS couldn't just leave it out there. They'd have been better off completely killing mobile than leaving Windows Mobile to compete with operating systems meant to be used on phones

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