BlackBerry to cut up to 40 percent of employees

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/09/report-blackberry-to-cut-up-to-40-percent-of-employees/

by cpeterso • 13 years ago

85 36 13 years ago

caval• 13 years ago

This is a good thing for Blackberry. The previous CEO's were too laid back, and this laid back attitude trickled down the ladder. A lot of long time employees still have this attitude, and are being let go to allow for new, ambitious people to be hired. Or so I've heard.

lowglow• 13 years ago

I'd like to invite any BlackBerry engineers over to IRC channel #Techendo on Freenode. We're working on something and would love if you want to make some change in the world. :)

auctiontheory2• 13 years ago

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

stephengillie6• 13 years ago

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

hnriot• 13 years ago

you think women don't objectify just as much as men do?

If you do, then you are very naive. Yet you don't hear men whining about about a gender imbalance because women get up to just as much objectification. There are other reasons why there's an imbalance, if you look at other factors, ethnicity, for example, you'll find the same imbalance, and for the same reasons.

auctiontheory2• 13 years ago

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.

chollida1• 13 years ago

I can't find any word on if this concentrated in either the software or hardware groups or if its across the board.

If its the former it seems like BBRY is trying to make a go of it as an independent company, if its the later then it looks like they are making themselves look pretty in an effort to sell themselves.

grumps• 13 years ago

Layoffs are never fun...and neither is life at a company leading up to those layoffs. Best of luck to them.

Overall I really like the blackberry platform it was great for messaging. Its to bad they weren't able to stay on top of the market but this is what happens.

adventured• 13 years ago

This sure sounds like the official end of Blackberry as a stand-alone company. To stay in the game on margins, apps, and consumer awareness they needed massive scale. Clearly those days are over.

I think it's safe to assume an acquisition (of Blackberry) isn't far behind.

JVIDEL• 13 years ago

Another case of socialization of incompetence: instead of blaming the subpar decision-makers who drove BB to the ground those who did the best they could to put this platform back in the game get a pink slip.

zainny• 13 years ago

I think maybe only two or so years ago BlackBerry had over 17,000 employees so in total we're talking about more than half of the company being cut in the space of a few years.

Huge when you think about it like that.

n00j• 13 years ago

Yup, in 2011 they has around 19,000 employees when they had their first major layoff. Kind of sad to see a once iconic Canadian company go downhill so fast these past couple year.

HorizonXP• 13 years ago

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.

stephengillie6• 13 years ago

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 the same situation, and their "loyal" userbase of mostly MS employees.

The choice seems obvious in hindsight, and was obvious to some people beforehand too.

colmvp• 13 years ago

What about Windows? I completely dig the Lumia but the lack of apps that I'm used to using on iOS is kind of a big annoyance.

flogic2• 13 years ago

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.

fencepost• 13 years ago

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.

stephengillie6• 13 years ago

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 better low-price hardware

The fastest messaging server (BES) became free for some reason... (couldn't compete with free* Activesync?)

Social networks and other messaging platforms overtook the free email alternative (BIS) and mobile-to-mobile messaging (BBM)

The most secure encryption fell by the wayside -- it was so secure that it was a liability, as some governments refused to let BES operate in their country because they couldn't spy through it.

The network was another liability, as people had a $10/mo higher phone bill to use a Blackberry than any other smartphone.

---

Blackberry still have the fast network, secure encryption, and a number of other assets, but as yet have failed combine those assets into any sort of compelling product.

flogic2• 13 years ago

Blackberry has 2 major problems. One, they're just not flashy enough to compete with Apple. Two, roll your own OS pretty much dooms you in computers. The network effect for compatibility is just too strong. Blackberry was fine before phones were really thought of as computing platforms.

systems2• 13 years ago

apple rolled her own OS, i dont think rolling your own OS is the problem ...

pavs3• 13 years ago

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.

eYsYs• 13 years ago

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.

dcurtis• 13 years ago

This is absolutely not true about Nokia.

Nokia took the competition seriously, but made a single fatal error: it tried to evolve its low end platform into its high end platform. While that strategy makes complete sense in 90% of cases for market innovation, in the mobile phone industry--which, it turns out, was going through revolution--Nokia should have done the opposite. People often forget that Nokia still controls more than 70% of the worldwide phone market, and controlled vastly more of it in the mid-2000's. In 2007, they had no idea that 90% of industry profits would come from the 30% of the market that they were not focusing on.

You can't really fault them for that, because strategically it makes perfect sense. They regarded the competition seriously but had a flawed approach/response.

That being said, they had a bunch of half-assed hedges against their fatal strategy, like high-ish end platforms such as Maemo, Symbian's advanced versions, etc.., but in fast moving markets with extraordinarily complicated infrastructure/platforms, this approach does not work. You can half-ass evolution, but you have to full-ass revolution.

They realized this mistake fairly early on, but by then it was too late to develop a platform, and full-assing it would have put the company's core competencies at huge risk. So Kallasvuo was fired, Elop was hired, the company moved in with Microsoft, and, eventually, they married.

systems2• 13 years ago

I really like your comment, I actually believe this goes really deep

when a company is of a certain size and top management is making millions, radical change becomes impossible

BB is dying, because it needed a radical change, but top management, I think, were too afraid to act on it

This is even true of lower levels inside organization, managers accept defeat rather than challenge it by requesting a radical change

To add more, I believe manager prefer to fail for doing small changes, rather than fail .. because they took on radical changes ...

they should have gone radical, but they went incremental, because its better for management to fail that way

bsullivan01• 13 years ago

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...

n1ghtmare_• 13 years ago

Too bad for all the people that worked hard to deliver BB's products. I wish them best of luck, hopefully they'll find something better.

kinkora• 13 years ago

The verge has a good write up on what happen to BB (rise and fall) if anyone is interested.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/21/2789676/rim-blackberry-mik...

xarball• 13 years ago

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.

gkwelding• 13 years ago

I read that as "BlackBerry to cut up 40 percent of employees", I'm not sure which headline would be worse....

BlackBerry to cut up to 40 percent of employees

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