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]