How about this for an understatement? ”I want to assure you, I am not satisfied with the performance of the company over the past year. We understand that support is not unanimous and that many of you are frustrated” is what Thorsten Heins, the CEO of RIM, told shareholders yesterday. You can understand their ‘frustration’ as RIM shares slumped another 5% after he delivered his message; making a c75% slump in ‘the past year’ referred to.
We’ve written about RIM many times. See Facing reality at RIM, RIM, grimmer and grimmer news and How the mighty have fallen. In turn, we are one of the c80m loyal users. To us, Blackberry has two USPs – its qwerty keyboard and its push email delivery system which just ‘kinda works’; particularly when abroad. We were therefore really disappointed that the all important Blackberry 10, to be launched in Q1 2013, would be touchscreen only. But yesterday, Heins announced that this would be “immediately followed by a version featuring a mini Qwerty keyboard”. Welcome news and glad they have started to listen.
Whether this will be enough to turn the tide is very questionable. But it’s a start. We still suspect that the most likely outcome will be a sale of all or parts of the RIM.