It is a strange fact of life here at TechMarketView that the most viewed article of all time – with tens of thousands of hits - was Blackberry down written in October in the midst of that week when RIM turned an outage drama into a corporate crisis. Strange because mobile telecomms is not exactly our core research area.
But we also know how many of you read Hotviews on your Blackberries. So we feel quite justified in covering RIM’s announcement that the outage cost them $50m. But that was nothing compared with the $485m charge RIM has taken on unsold inventory on their Playbook tablet – which has now been slashed in price from $500 to $200. It was the mother of all profits warnings and RIM shares fell 10% on the news – that’s a 75% fall now from their 2011 high of $70.
Just as RIM’s handling of the outage was classic ‘how not to do it’, their Playbook was a pretty classic ‘what not to do in a product launch’. What is the #1 reason for owning a Blackberry? Yep, it’s pretty good at email. So what feature would be a must on Blackberry tablet? You got it…and they didn’t. But still RIM vows to continue with its tablet.
We don’t usually quote other analysts but Pierre Ferragu of Bernstein Research got it just right in his quote in the FT: “What is more worrying, of course, is the profound denial the tone of the release reflects. Although it appears obvious to us that RIM’s current strategy is bound to fail rapidly, the company continues to support it vehemently.”