Howdy, I'm MG Siegler. I’m a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch. This is where I collect things.
Selected works. Some haikus. Some investments. Ask away. Archive.
Showing 31 posts tagged RIM
Roger Chen for CNET:
A year ago, Balsillie was one of the largest individual shareholders in BlackBerry (formerly known as Research In Motion) with 26.8 million shares in the company. But in a document filed today, BlackBerry disclosed that Balsillie no longer holds any shares in the company.
While he formerly had a RIM job, no surprise that he took a dump here.
(I’m sorry, I’m 12, I know.)
You should not buy this phone unless you have emotional and cultural reasons to love Blackberry, or some arcane enterprise reason I will not pretend to understand.
Brian Lam on the new BlackBerry devices for Wirecutter.
Ouch.
[via Emptyage]
The Official BlackBerry Blog:
We have an exciting new addition to Team BlackBerry. In a true collaboration, Alicia Keys is now an official partner to BlackBerry, acting as Global Creative Director. Working closely with app developers, content creators, retailers, carriers and entertainers, Keys will be an active member of the BlackBerry community.
The bullshit, it reeks of bullshit! Paying celebrities to take “jobs” seems to be the new celebrity endorsement. Yes, even RIM jobs.
But seriously, smart move to change the company name to “BlackBerry”. Most consumers probably already thought that was the company name. And those of us who did know the actual name have basically only used it in the context of the company slowly dying over the past few years (or, well, other contexts).
It’s like a homeless man giving food stamps to a man on death row.
Two sinking ships passing in the night…
High-res
BB10: *stifles giggle*
(image from Gizmodo)
For serious? This can’t be for serious. What year is it?
Ian Austen reporting on RIM CEO Thorsten Heins for The New York Times:
“Whenever you enter an office, you don’t have your laptop with you, you have your mobile computer power exactly here,” Mr. Heins said, patting a BlackBerry 10 phone sitting in a holster on his hip. “You will not carry a laptop within three to five years.”
While I largely agree with the overall sentiment, I’d still bet on RIM being a services company sometime in the same time-span — perhaps one owned by someone else. Also, it’s hard to take any of that seriously when you read that Heins has a BlackBerry “holster” on his hip. It makes the image at the top of the story pure gravy, as a result.
Six months after the iPhone launch? Blackberry 10 is slated for 6 YEARS after the original iPhone announcement. That's the real joke.
Asked by robotfranchise
A very fair point.
Jon Fingas:
Worried that RIM might face any further delays of BlackBerry 10? Don’t be. CEO Thorsten Heins just confirmed at his BlackBerry Jam presentation that carrier testing for the new OS should begin this October, and that the platform launch is still slated for early 2013.
Serious question: does RIM realize that I have an iPhone 5 in my hands right now? That it came out last Friday?
If Nokia looks bad shipping the new Lumias six weeks after the iPhone launch, RIM looks like an absolute joke shipping BlackBerry 10 six months after the iPhone launch.
Jean-Louis Gassée lays out why the saving of RIM will look nothing like the resurrection of Apple. And he puts forth a plan in which RIM changes itself into a services company, but has to go private to do so.
His conclusion:
Will this work for RIM? I don’t think so.
It’s a race between what comes first: BB10, zero cash balance or an acquisition.
High-res
There’s a reason RIM got rid of its jobs.rim.com domain a long time ago.
Will never get old.
