Thorsten Heins, the new BlackBerry boss, is tasked with making cool things that people want and will buy. Will it happen? His recent interview with CrackBerry isn’t encouraging. But were we really expecting more the guy who spent the last five years overseeing the waning BlackBerry smartphone portfolio?
I chatted with the folks — lots of questions, good discussions — and there came a theme out of it. I must have said somewhere at the end to inspire the people and get the message across “Let’s rock and roll this!”. Now I see this everywhere as their BlackBerry theme. “Let’s rock and roll this”… I like that.
Heins thinks all RIM is missing is a powerful marketing push — an image overhaul. Thorsten’s RIM already sounds about as cool as a Bar Mitzvah, sans fun photo booth and potential making out. A wise CEO would step in and say “Christ, things are not looking good. I’ll be the first to admit it. Now let’s figure out what’s wrong with us and change those things.”
Thorsten?
What I wanted to make clear to the market is that we believe in our own strength, we are BlackBerry, we are an integrated solution, hardware, software, services and network.
Thorsten doesn’t get the competition; Android is a Godzilla competitor. Know thy enemy, Thorsten:
Just take a look where the Android OEMs are. I leave this to you. Take a look at their recent announcements and what you will immediately see is there is just no room for differentiation because they are all the same.
Well, no, it’s kind of the opposite — Android’s problem is fragmentation, not uniformity. But I guess they’re all the same in that they’re all phones, yes.
Thorsten does have one thing down: “This is not baking cookies.” Yep — people like and buy cookies.
Hit CrackBerry for the full review. [CrackBerry]
Sicarius123
Saturday, January 28, 2012 at 7:13 PMJust what Blackberry needs. A CEO who thinks their products are the best of the best and can’t understand why the competition is doing better.
minzhu
Monday, January 30, 2012 at 10:16 AMDon’t blame CEO, they want RIM win.
RIM has strange culture and self distruct political environment.
In RIM if a new hired person figure out major problem and introduce efficient approach, both manager and his buddy group member will proof their wrong approach works. just like someone point out driving a car is right way, pushing a car is wrong way, then both manager and his buddy group member will hate you, and proof that 3 person can also move the car by pushing it. cheating email will be sent to some vice president, saying like: see, the car moving, pushing a car is a natural part of the process, in order to deny new hired contribution of introducing skill of drive a car, they have to deny merit of driving a car.
It is very strange company culture and strange company political environment, it promote stealing and cheating skill. RIM’s management may be a typical instance in MBA course.
This culture deny or steal hardworking team members’ contribution/innovation, generate strange political environment, destroy RIM.
So don’t blame CEO, some of their VPs and VPs’ expert generate terrible culture and self destruct political environment.
TSH
Monday, January 30, 2012 at 10:56 AMI don’t want RIM to die, but I fear that they are just becoming irrelevant. These days the services they provide are becoming less and less valuable, and their devices less and less desirable. At least Nokia has something to fall back on (featurephones) and a partnership (MS) to bring them forward – I really don’t know what RIM can do to revive itself.
ULTR4VI0LNC3
Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 6:56 PMTo be perfectly blunt this sounds like a typical case of flogging a dead horse as the saying goes, I honestly think that Thorsten couldn’t give two flying craps about RIM all he’s interested in is collecting as many millions of dollars as he can before his inevitable demise, i mean he can’t be that stupid how can some get to a position such as his without having any brains? no he knows exactly what he’s doing and it’s a sad demise for what was and still could potentially be a great company, but if they have any chance of ever turning themselves around they first need to get rid of the leaches that are standing in line behind Thorsten and start bringing some real inovation to the table, out of all the manufacturers RIM seems to have the most loyal fan base and if they play their cards right they could just pull themselves out of this whole.