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THE RISE AND FALL OF BLACKBERRY
In
1984, Mike Lazaridis, an engineering student at the University of Waterloo,
and Douglas Fregin, an engineering student at the University of Windsor,
founded an electronics and computer science consulting company called
Research In Motion, or RIM. For years the company tinkered in obscurity,
until it focused on a breakthrough technology: an easy, secure, and
effective device that allowed workers to send and receive e-mails while
away from the office. They called it the BlackBerry. RIM grew into one of
the world’s most valuable tech companies. The BlackBerry became the
indispensable accessory of business executives, heads of state, and
Hollywood celebrities—until iPhone and Android came along and spoiled the
party. Today the company, which has been renamed, simply, BlackBerry , is
burning through cash as sales keep falling. On Nov. 21, BlackBerry shares
closed at just above $6, the lowest it’s been in almost 15 years.Over the
last two months, Bloomberg Businessweek spoke to dozens of current and
former BlackBerry employees, vendors, and associates. Here is their account
of the thrill of BlackBerry’s ascension—and the heartache of watching its
demise.
By
Felix Gillette, Diane Brady and Caroline Winter
GARY MOUSSEAU eighth employee at RIM and software developer and manager,
1991-2007:
I first met Mike Lazaridis when he interviewed me. Mike is a very good
orator and communicator of technology. He was a convincing-enough soul that
I ended up taking a 13 percent pay cut to join RIM. I started in 1991. My
first job was to build my own desk. There was no more room for me. They put
me in the fax reception area. I was the guy receiving packages. I sat
beside the fax machine, which was not fun. It was a small place. It was
crowded. We were above a pizza joint.
In 1992, Chief Executive Officer Lazaridis hires Jim Balsillie, a
Harvard Business School graduate, to help manage the cash-strapped
business. Balsillie takes out a second mortgage and invests $250,000 in
return for a one-third stake and soon becomes co-CEO. (Balsillie and
Lazaridis declined to be interviewed for this story.)
PATRICK SPENCE, senior vice president and managing director for global
sales and marketing, 1998-2012:Jim was really strategic in terms of how
he was thinking and really ambitious in terms of what we wanted to do. You
don’t meet many Canadians that are ambitious in that kind of way. MOUSSEAU
:We eventually decided to replace a very large bulky radio modem that
IBM used for [basic personal communication] service. This was the RIM 900.
It was a clamshell device. Some would affectionately call it the bullfrog.
We sold a lot of them. JIM ESTILL, member of the board, 1997-2010: In
the early days at RIM, people had no idea what a smartphone was. People had
no idea what two-way pagers were. But they had such a cool factor. You’d
take one out, and everybody would want to touch it and play with it and see
what it was. MOUSSEAU: Mike and I and a few others got obsessed with
auto-forwarding our Exchange mailbox messages to our belts. But at that
time you couldn’t reply to anything. So one day, Mike came in and said he
had decided to nix all the 30 software projects that we were spinning our
wheels on. He said, “We’re going to create a solution to this two-mailbox
problem.”
RIM goes public in 1997, listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange; shares
would begin trading on Nasdaq two years later. Balsillie establishes “the
doughnut rule,” in which employees caught talking about the share price
would have to buy doughnuts for everyone at the company. The following year
the company releases the RIM 950 wireless device, featuring a miniature
qwerty keyboard.
BRUCE POON TIP, Canadian entrepreneur, founder of G Adventures: I was
part of a group called the Innovators Alliance. Jim [Balsillie] came in and
held up this prototype that was in the shape of a blackberry. It was dark
blue and had grooves where the keys would be. When he said, “It’s called a
BlackBerry,” people started rolling their eyes. They thought it was a
stupid name. This was the height of the dot-com boom. He had this dream of
people getting e-mails on the move, and the feeling at the time was, “Why
would anyone want their e-mails away from the office?”
From early on, RIM focuses its sales and marketing efforts on corporate
customers, not consumers.
MOUSSEAU: The marketing team came up with the strategy of launch ing
the desktop redirector [which forwarded messages and data to and from a
mobile device] by seeding it with all these CTOs and CEOs. All they had to
do was install this piece of software on their desk and leave their
computer on. That’s it. Just buy this device. Load this software. And it
just worked. SPENCE: About a week after we launched, one of the
orders came in. It was from Michael Dell. We didn’t have a lot of promotion
at that point. He had found BlackBerry basically on the Web. I sent him an
e-mail: “Hey, Michael, I saw that you placed an order. If you need any help
don’t hesitate to let me know.” I got an e-mail back in like 30 seconds,
like, “Thank you, I’m super excited about it.”
KEVIN MICHALUK, founder of CrackBerry.com, a news site: BlackBerry
was a darling of enterprise. If you had a BlackBerry you were an important
person, as at that time a lot of people didn’t have a smartphone. It was
almost a status symbol within the company. It was the most intuitive
communication device. With that blinking red light, it had that addictive
quality.
CHRIS KEY, global account manager and carrier sales and relationship
manager, 2001-09: When I met with the CTO of a major company, he
referred to BlackBerry as “digital heroin.”
Although its marketing strategy focused on corporate buyers, the brand
becomes a hit with consumers. Oprah Winfrey declares it a “favorite thing”
in 2003. B8.6
KEY:In 2004, I shipped off to India. I became very active in feeding
devices to Bollywood celebrities. I recall going to Bombay fashion week,
and I took a box-load of BlackBerrys. A friend of mine is an editor for
Vogue. She put me in the VIP section, and I drank Champagne and ate
strawberries and handed out BlackBerrys to all the celebrities.
JESSE BOUDREAU, vice president, BlackBerry software excellence, 2004-08:
In 2006 the BlackBerry Pearl came out, and it was the “candy bar”
format, and it had a track wheel, and it had really good connectivity. It
was really nice for scrolling around, and it could play video, and it had a
camera. Up until that point, Mike had said, “That’s crazy, why would I ever
want a camera?” All of a sudden BlackBerry becomes a consumer play. WASHINGTON:
I was on a team called the Fast 100. We were tasked with preparing
carriers for launch. There was a group of us. We went around the world from
Germany to Brazil to Chile. Three years went in a blink of an eye. There
wasn’t a meeting I couldn’t get. All I had to say was, “Hey, I’m bringing
the BlackBerrys.”
As BlackBerry’s popularity explodes, the company struggles to keep up
with demand—and with rapidly changing consumer tastes.
BOUDREAU: In four years we went from [approximately] 2,000 to 12,000
people. Having been at Nortel, the politics that get played is exponential.
I was starting to see it be like Nortel. There was bureaucracy. There was
pointless process. You were getting decisions by committee. MOUSSEAU: I
was in a town hall meeting, and I asked a question about research and
development. And they just kind of shot me down: “Oh, research is for
people who don’t want to actually work anymore.” It was kind of a real slap
in the face. Washington: Lazaridis used to come into these meetings, and it
was almost likePulp Fiction, where he’d open the case and there would be
this golden glow of devices. We were all super eager to see it. Around 2007
the glow was getting a lot smaller every time he came around.
In June 2007, the first iPhone hits the stores. Far from recognizing the
potential threat to BlackBerry’s dominance, Lazaridis and Balsillie
publicly belittle Apple’s device, criticizing its short battery life and
weaker security.
LESSARD: You saw these iterative products coming to the market from
Microsoft and Palm. There were so many devices where people said, “Oh, this
one will take on BlackBerry.” There was a sense of confidence in the
company where we thought, “It’s not going to happen.” The same thing
definitely happened when Apple introduced the iPhone. KEY: I
remember being at a [customer] meeting and the CIO was carrying an iPhone.
I found out that a lot of senior executives … were carrying iPhones. That
was a big red flag for me. The attitude for most of the people in the
senior leadership at BlackBerry was, “The BlackBerry solution is secure.
It’ll lock down company data. It’ll allow the organization to maintain
complete control over the business use of the device. IPhone is a music
player and a consumer toy.”
In May 2008, the company releases the BlackBerry Bold 9000. The
following month, shares peak at $148. That fall, the first Android phones
go on sale.
MICHALUK: When iPhone 3G and Bold 9000 came out at the same time, I
ripped the [Bold 9000] apart in an article because the browser was
completely unusable. BlackBerry launched that Web browser without it really
working. That Bold 9000 browser was one of the cracks in the egg. GILLENWATER:
If BlackBerry was going to be serious about consumers, they needed to
make a fundamental shift in the way products were thought about, created,
iterated, marketed, and sold. This was done but never to the extent
necessary. It was always a partial effort. Kunal Gupta, CEO of Polar, which
develops applications for companies to publish on mobile platforms,
including BlackBerry devices: When they launched the Storm [in 2008], that
was a moment of pause. We got an early prototype. When you clicked
something, it would take longer than it should. It would crash or freeze.
You were used to every BlackBerry product being a winner. This one felt
like an afterthought. BOUDREAU: Mike Lazaridis really got the
hardware. I don’t think he had a good handle on the consumer app side of
things. Mike is going to go through on calendar and do esoteric things to
see if it’s broke. Did he do it on maps? No. Did he do it on photos? No.
The company was getting bigger, and he had all these other distractions.
In the latter half of the 2000s, Co-CEO Balsillie distances himself from
day-to-day operations. He founds a school of international affairs and
makes three attempts to buy a National Hockey League team, a move opposed
by the NHL.
THOMAS HOMER-DIXON, professor of political science at the Balsillie School
of International Affairs: I was with Jim on an icebreaker in the Arctic
in the summer of 2010 for a weeklong seminar on Arctic issues. That’s when
things really turned. Saudi Arabia, India, and others were saying RIM had
to open up to national intelligence. He gave a talk at the end of the week
to everybody on board. He started out by saying, “You know, I’m an
electrician’s son from Peterborough. A lot of people who are involved in
building a $60 billion company like to look back and attribute their
success to smart moves along the way. What I’m going to tell you is a story
about luck—and extraordinary luck at key moments along the way.” He
identified six moments where RIM could have failed. A combination of luck
and acumen had put them on the right path. Someone asked, “What do you
think is going to happen now?” He said, “Well, it’s really hard to say.
This is a rapidly expanding market. We may have a diminishing share of that
market, but who knows?”
In April 2010, Apple introduces the iPad, one of the most successful
consumer products ever. A year later, the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet goes
on sale. Slogan: “Amateur hour is over.” It flops.
ALKARIM NASSER, founder and managing partner of app maker Bnotions: I
worked there in the summer of 2004 as a computer science and business major
at the University of Windsor. We’d get hot lunches, sandwiches. I ended up
starting a company called Bnotions. One of the first apps we developed was
on the BlackBerry platform, in 2009, for Ernst & Young. … We didn’t
really give up on them until late 2010, when the PlayBook launched without
e-mail. That was the nail in the coffin. We stopped offering a BlackBerry
app. Customers stopped asking for it.
In January 2012, with its market share and stock price falling,
BlackBerry announces that Balsillie and Lazaridis will resign as co-CEOs.
The chief operating officer for product and sales, Thorsten Heins, a former
Siemens executive who had joined BlackBerry in 2007, becomes CEO. (Heins
did not respond to requests to be interviewed.)
MACLEOD: It was obviously a huge deal when Jim and Mike decided to
pull back a little bit, and there was a new leader in place. Up until that
point everything had come from these two guys. They were so much a part of
our DNA. Jim and Mike and RIM were kind of inseparable. But having someone
like Thorsten, who was a part of the culture and who had been with the team
for a while, there was an element of soft transference. He was a known
quantity. GILLENWATER: I was very worried when an insider was chosen
as the new CEO. I was especially worried when suboptimal execution
continued: missed delivery dates, buggy products, weak marketing.
In 2013, RIM changes its name to BlackBerry. In a muchridiculed move, it
names Alicia Keys the company’s global creative director. It rolls out its
first smartphones powered by the BlackBerry 10 operating system, which
Heins says will offer “a user experience that adapts beyond anything you
have seen before.”
MICHALUK: BB10 was too different. They killed the track pad. They
killed the back button, so all your muscle memory of how things work goes
out the door.
In August 2013 Prem Watsa the head of Fairfax
, , Financial Holdings, announces that with
BlackBerry exploring a possible sale, he would be stepping down from the
board. On Sept. 23, Fairfax makes public a letter of intent to acquire
BlackBerry for $9 per share and take the company private. BlackBerry
reveals a $965 million quarterly loss and says it will be laying off 4,500
employees.
The company continues to go through its money. Cash and short-term
investments decreased by almost $500 million in the second fiscal quarter,
to $2.3 billion. In November, Fairfax Financial’s $4.7 billion buyout bid
collapses. Heins is ousted as chief executive and replaced by former Sybase
chief John Chen. On Dec. 2, with speculation rampant that BlackBerry might
exit the hardware business entirely, Chen publishes an open letter to
BlackBerry’s customers. “Our ‘for sale’ sign has been taken down and we are
here to stay,” he writes. “[R]eports of our death are greatly exaggerated.”
JEFF GADWAY, current senior manager for product marketing: When you
go into the focus groups, and you talk to customers about brands in the
technology space, there are brands that don’t come up at all anymore. And
then there’s BlackBerry. People have fond sentiments about BlackBerry. If
people didn’t have that affinity toward the brand, I would be challenged to
really believe in what we’re doing. People want to see BlackBerry succeed.
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ET131207
In
1984, Mike Lazaridis, an engineering student at the University of Waterloo,
and Douglas Fregin, an engineering student at the University of Windsor,
founded an electronics and computer science consulting company called
Research In Motion, or RIM. For years the company tinkered in obscurity,
until it focused on a breakthrough technology: an easy, secure, and
effective device that allowed workers to send and receive e-mails while
away from the office. They called it the BlackBerry. RIM grew into one of
the world’s most valuable tech companies. The BlackBerry became the
indispensable accessory of business executives, heads of state, and
Hollywood celebrities—until iPhone and Android came along and spoiled the
party. Today the company, which has been renamed, simply, BlackBerry , is
burning through cash as sales keep falling. On Nov. 21, BlackBerry shares
closed at just above $6, the lowest it’s been in almost 15 years.Over the
last two months, Bloomberg Businessweek spoke to dozens of current and
former BlackBerry employees, vendors, and associates. Here is their account
of the thrill of BlackBerry’s ascension—and the heartache of watching its
demise.
By
Felix Gillette, Diane Brady and Caroline Winter
GARY MOUSSEAU eighth employee at RIM and software developer and manager,
1991-2007:
I first met Mike Lazaridis when he interviewed me. Mike is a very good
orator and communicator of technology. He was a convincing-enough soul that
I ended up taking a 13 percent pay cut to join RIM. I started in 1991. My
first job was to build my own desk. There was no more room for me. They put
me in the fax reception area. I was the guy receiving packages. I sat
beside the fax machine, which was not fun. It was a small place. It was
crowded. We were above a pizza joint.
In 1992, Chief Executive Officer Lazaridis hires Jim Balsillie, a
Harvard Business School graduate, to help manage the cash-strapped
business. Balsillie takes out a second mortgage and invests $250,000 in
return for a one-third stake and soon becomes co-CEO. (Balsillie and
Lazaridis declined to be interviewed for this story.)
PATRICK SPENCE, senior vice president and managing director for global
sales and marketing, 1998-2012:Jim was really strategic in terms of how
he was thinking and really ambitious in terms of what we wanted to do. You
don’t meet many Canadians that are ambitious in that kind of way. MOUSSEAU
:We eventually decided to replace a very large bulky radio modem that
IBM used for [basic personal communication] service. This was the RIM 900.
It was a clamshell device. Some would affectionately call it the bullfrog.
We sold a lot of them. JIM ESTILL, member of the board, 1997-2010: In
the early days at RIM, people had no idea what a smartphone was. People had
no idea what two-way pagers were. But they had such a cool factor. You’d
take one out, and everybody would want to touch it and play with it and see
what it was. MOUSSEAU: Mike and I and a few others got obsessed with
auto-forwarding our Exchange mailbox messages to our belts. But at that
time you couldn’t reply to anything. So one day, Mike came in and said he
had decided to nix all the 30 software projects that we were spinning our
wheels on. He said, “We’re going to create a solution to this two-mailbox
problem.”
RIM goes public in 1997, listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange; shares
would begin trading on Nasdaq two years later. Balsillie establishes “the
doughnut rule,” in which employees caught talking about the share price
would have to buy doughnuts for everyone at the company. The following year
the company releases the RIM 950 wireless device, featuring a miniature
qwerty keyboard.
BRUCE POON TIP, Canadian entrepreneur, founder of G Adventures: I was
part of a group called the Innovators Alliance. Jim [Balsillie] came in and
held up this prototype that was in the shape of a blackberry. It was dark
blue and had grooves where the keys would be. When he said, “It’s called a
BlackBerry,” people started rolling their eyes. They thought it was a
stupid name. This was the height of the dot-com boom. He had this dream of
people getting e-mails on the move, and the feeling at the time was, “Why
would anyone want their e-mails away from the office?”
From early on, RIM focuses its sales and marketing efforts on corporate
customers, not consumers.
MOUSSEAU: The marketing team came up with the strategy of launch ing
the desktop redirector [which forwarded messages and data to and from a
mobile device] by seeding it with all these CTOs and CEOs. All they had to
do was install this piece of software on their desk and leave their
computer on. That’s it. Just buy this device. Load this software. And it
just worked. SPENCE: About a week after we launched, one of the
orders came in. It was from Michael Dell. We didn’t have a lot of promotion
at that point. He had found BlackBerry basically on the Web. I sent him an
e-mail: “Hey, Michael, I saw that you placed an order. If you need any help
don’t hesitate to let me know.” I got an e-mail back in like 30 seconds,
like, “Thank you, I’m super excited about it.”
KEVIN MICHALUK, founder of CrackBerry.com, a news site: BlackBerry
was a darling of enterprise. If you had a BlackBerry you were an important
person, as at that time a lot of people didn’t have a smartphone. It was
almost a status symbol within the company. It was the most intuitive
communication device. With that blinking red light, it had that addictive
quality.
CHRIS KEY, global account manager and carrier sales and relationship
manager, 2001-09: When I met with the CTO of a major company, he
referred to BlackBerry as “digital heroin.”
Although its marketing strategy focused on corporate buyers, the brand
becomes a hit with consumers. Oprah Winfrey declares it a “favorite thing”
in 2003. B8.6
KEY:In 2004, I shipped off to India. I became very active in feeding
devices to Bollywood celebrities. I recall going to Bombay fashion week,
and I took a box-load of BlackBerrys. A friend of mine is an editor for
Vogue. She put me in the VIP section, and I drank Champagne and ate
strawberries and handed out BlackBerrys to all the celebrities.
JESSE BOUDREAU, vice president, BlackBerry software excellence, 2004-08:
In 2006 the BlackBerry Pearl came out, and it was the “candy bar”
format, and it had a track wheel, and it had really good connectivity. It
was really nice for scrolling around, and it could play video, and it had a
camera. Up until that point, Mike had said, “That’s crazy, why would I ever
want a camera?” All of a sudden BlackBerry becomes a consumer play. WASHINGTON:
I was on a team called the Fast 100. We were tasked with preparing
carriers for launch. There was a group of us. We went around the world from
Germany to Brazil to Chile. Three years went in a blink of an eye. There
wasn’t a meeting I couldn’t get. All I had to say was, “Hey, I’m bringing
the BlackBerrys.”
As BlackBerry’s popularity explodes, the company struggles to keep up
with demand—and with rapidly changing consumer tastes.
BOUDREAU: In four years we went from [approximately] 2,000 to 12,000
people. Having been at Nortel, the politics that get played is exponential.
I was starting to see it be like Nortel. There was bureaucracy. There was
pointless process. You were getting decisions by committee. MOUSSEAU: I
was in a town hall meeting, and I asked a question about research and
development. And they just kind of shot me down: “Oh, research is for
people who don’t want to actually work anymore.” It was kind of a real slap
in the face. Washington: Lazaridis used to come into these meetings, and it
was almost likePulp Fiction, where he’d open the case and there would be
this golden glow of devices. We were all super eager to see it. Around 2007
the glow was getting a lot smaller every time he came around.
In June 2007, the first iPhone hits the stores. Far from recognizing the
potential threat to BlackBerry’s dominance, Lazaridis and Balsillie
publicly belittle Apple’s device, criticizing its short battery life and
weaker security.
LESSARD: You saw these iterative products coming to the market from
Microsoft and Palm. There were so many devices where people said, “Oh, this
one will take on BlackBerry.” There was a sense of confidence in the
company where we thought, “It’s not going to happen.” The same thing
definitely happened when Apple introduced the iPhone. KEY: I
remember being at a [customer] meeting and the CIO was carrying an iPhone.
I found out that a lot of senior executives … were carrying iPhones. That
was a big red flag for me. The attitude for most of the people in the
senior leadership at BlackBerry was, “The BlackBerry solution is secure.
It’ll lock down company data. It’ll allow the organization to maintain
complete control over the business use of the device. IPhone is a music
player and a consumer toy.”
In May 2008, the company releases the BlackBerry Bold 9000. The
following month, shares peak at $148. That fall, the first Android phones
go on sale.
MICHALUK: When iPhone 3G and Bold 9000 came out at the same time, I
ripped the [Bold 9000] apart in an article because the browser was
completely unusable. BlackBerry launched that Web browser without it really
working. That Bold 9000 browser was one of the cracks in the egg. GILLENWATER:
If BlackBerry was going to be serious about consumers, they needed to
make a fundamental shift in the way products were thought about, created,
iterated, marketed, and sold. This was done but never to the extent
necessary. It was always a partial effort. Kunal Gupta, CEO of Polar, which
develops applications for companies to publish on mobile platforms,
including BlackBerry devices: When they launched the Storm [in 2008], that
was a moment of pause. We got an early prototype. When you clicked
something, it would take longer than it should. It would crash or freeze.
You were used to every BlackBerry product being a winner. This one felt
like an afterthought. BOUDREAU: Mike Lazaridis really got the
hardware. I don’t think he had a good handle on the consumer app side of
things. Mike is going to go through on calendar and do esoteric things to
see if it’s broke. Did he do it on maps? No. Did he do it on photos? No.
The company was getting bigger, and he had all these other distractions.
In the latter half of the 2000s, Co-CEO Balsillie distances himself from
day-to-day operations. He founds a school of international affairs and
makes three attempts to buy a National Hockey League team, a move opposed
by the NHL.
THOMAS HOMER-DIXON, professor of political science at the Balsillie School
of International Affairs: I was with Jim on an icebreaker in the Arctic
in the summer of 2010 for a weeklong seminar on Arctic issues. That’s when
things really turned. Saudi Arabia, India, and others were saying RIM had
to open up to national intelligence. He gave a talk at the end of the week
to everybody on board. He started out by saying, “You know, I’m an
electrician’s son from Peterborough. A lot of people who are involved in
building a $60 billion company like to look back and attribute their
success to smart moves along the way. What I’m going to tell you is a story
about luck—and extraordinary luck at key moments along the way.” He
identified six moments where RIM could have failed. A combination of luck
and acumen had put them on the right path. Someone asked, “What do you
think is going to happen now?” He said, “Well, it’s really hard to say.
This is a rapidly expanding market. We may have a diminishing share of that
market, but who knows?”
In April 2010, Apple introduces the iPad, one of the most successful
consumer products ever. A year later, the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet goes
on sale. Slogan: “Amateur hour is over.” It flops.
ALKARIM NASSER, founder and managing partner of app maker Bnotions: I
worked there in the summer of 2004 as a computer science and business major
at the University of Windsor. We’d get hot lunches, sandwiches. I ended up
starting a company called Bnotions. One of the first apps we developed was
on the BlackBerry platform, in 2009, for Ernst & Young. … We didn’t
really give up on them until late 2010, when the PlayBook launched without
e-mail. That was the nail in the coffin. We stopped offering a BlackBerry
app. Customers stopped asking for it.
In January 2012, with its market share and stock price falling,
BlackBerry announces that Balsillie and Lazaridis will resign as co-CEOs.
The chief operating officer for product and sales, Thorsten Heins, a former
Siemens executive who had joined BlackBerry in 2007, becomes CEO. (Heins
did not respond to requests to be interviewed.)
MACLEOD: It was obviously a huge deal when Jim and Mike decided to
pull back a little bit, and there was a new leader in place. Up until that
point everything had come from these two guys. They were so much a part of
our DNA. Jim and Mike and RIM were kind of inseparable. But having someone
like Thorsten, who was a part of the culture and who had been with the team
for a while, there was an element of soft transference. He was a known
quantity. GILLENWATER: I was very worried when an insider was chosen
as the new CEO. I was especially worried when suboptimal execution
continued: missed delivery dates, buggy products, weak marketing.
In 2013, RIM changes its name to BlackBerry. In a muchridiculed move, it
names Alicia Keys the company’s global creative director. It rolls out its
first smartphones powered by the BlackBerry 10 operating system, which
Heins says will offer “a user experience that adapts beyond anything you
have seen before.”
MICHALUK: BB10 was too different. They killed the track pad. They
killed the back button, so all your muscle memory of how things work goes
out the door.
In August 2013 Prem Watsa the head of Fairfax
, , Financial Holdings, announces that with
BlackBerry exploring a possible sale, he would be stepping down from the
board. On Sept. 23, Fairfax makes public a letter of intent to acquire
BlackBerry for $9 per share and take the company private. BlackBerry
reveals a $965 million quarterly loss and says it will be laying off 4,500
employees.
The company continues to go through its money. Cash and short-term
investments decreased by almost $500 million in the second fiscal quarter,
to $2.3 billion. In November, Fairfax Financial’s $4.7 billion buyout bid
collapses. Heins is ousted as chief executive and replaced by former Sybase
chief John Chen. On Dec. 2, with speculation rampant that BlackBerry might
exit the hardware business entirely, Chen publishes an open letter to
BlackBerry’s customers. “Our ‘for sale’ sign has been taken down and we are
here to stay,” he writes. “[R]eports of our death are greatly exaggerated.”
JEFF GADWAY, current senior manager for product marketing: When you
go into the focus groups, and you talk to customers about brands in the
technology space, there are brands that don’t come up at all anymore. And
then there’s BlackBerry. People have fond sentiments about BlackBerry. If
people didn’t have that affinity toward the brand, I would be challenged to
really believe in what we’re doing. People want to see BlackBerry succeed.
|
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