Howdy, I'm MG Siegler. I’m a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch. This is where I collect things.
Some selected works. Some haikus. Some investments. Ask away.
Showing 31 posts tagged RIM
Arik Hesseldahl:
Heins didn’t quantify the expected loss. Analysts had been forecasting a 42-cent per-share profit on a non-GAAP basis and operating profit of $264 million. This looks like a pretty serious turn for the worse and only adds to the complexity of the mess that Heins has to clean up.
That’s two in a row. One more quarter and you have a trend that they may not be able to pull out of.
…yet.
The writing is so very obviously on the wall here. And not just the consumer market, eventually all markets. If RIM exists in 5 years, I’d bet it’s solely in services and/or some suite of apps like BBM. If.
In just the past year, RIM’s stock has dropped from close to $60-a-share to under $15-a-share. After today’s total bloodbath, their total market cap tomorrow may be half of what Apple made in profit last quarter.
Think about that for a second.
Co-founder Jim Balsillie out.
CTO David Yach out.
COO Jim Rowan out.
….RIM shot!
A year ago, RIM reported nearly a billion in profit. Just in the past quarter, revenue is down $1 billion and they’ve swung from $667 million in profit to a loss.
How fast they fall.
Personally, I would have gone with the following headline: RIM Offering A Cup Of Shitty, Hot Coffee To Those In Hell.
Peter Kafka reporting on new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins’ call with analysts this morning:
And the new tech that the company has in the pipeline — a revised version of its PlayBook tablet, and a new operating system due out in the fall — are great. You’ll see: “I don’t think there is a drastic change needed.”
RIM is still awash in revenue, so there is undoubtedly push-back to really shaking stuff up. But this sure sounds like RIM’s new CEO fails to see the writing on the wall, just as his predecessors clearly did.
And that shouldn’t be surprising. As Kafka notes, Heins has been RIM’s COO for the past four years. He’s the guy former co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis were grooming to take their place one day. That day came sooner than they expected, but all parties seem to be failing to acknowledge why.
RIM needs to quit dicking around with the PlayBook and focus on either what they’re good at (enterprise-focused smartphones) or something entirely new that blows away the market the way the first BlackBerrys did. To be honest, they should probably be doing both if they want to exist in 5 years.
The most troubling thing Heins said today:
Q: Please go into detail: What are your priorities for the next 100 days?
Heins: We need to get better at market communications.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Great headline by Kevin C. Tofel.
HP killed the TouchPad way too early. RIM will apparently kill the PlayBook far too late. They need to kill it right now and focus. But they won’t.
Do you think that RIM can possibly regain market share in 2012 provided that Blackberry 10 ships? Surely Android and iOS are too far ahead now in terms of adoption rates?
Asked by highway-66-revisited-deactivate
If they change their entire strategy, maybe. But they won’t.
Anything can be turned around (see: Apple, for example), but it takes major changes and time. RIM has neither in them. This stripping the CEOs of the Chairmanship sounds like a joke. It’s putting a paper towel over a head wound. The fact that there are still co-CEOs and co-Chairmans is a joke.
If I were RIM, I would spend all of my R&D figuring out what the next big thing will be after the smartphone — or the next generation smartphone that’s far beyond what we have today. I’d bet it all on that and not look back. They’ve already lost this race, but they don’t realize it yet. That’s the most dangerous position to be in.
No surprise here, except that it could be a joint bid. Can three companies now in different stages of failing in mobile team up to win? Do three wrongs make a right?
My favorite part though:
According to two people close to the company, RIM executives have approached other smart-phone makers, including Samsung Electronics Co. and HTC Corp. about licensing RIM’s new operating system.
That’s a joke, right? Those guys would ditch Android for something much worse with absolutely no app ecosystem? And they’d pay for the privilege?
And people wonder why RIM is failing. If that report is true, it’s clearly being run by people who have completely lost touch with reality. Though I guess that’s been pretty evident the past couple of years…
Again, everyone is so disappointed with the iPhone 4S that they’re ditching their old phones to get it.
I have a number of Android-carrying friends who also made the switch already. With the Nexus Prime due next week, this is going to be really interesting to watch.
Either way, RIM sure seems fucked (just in case that wasn’t already abundantly clear).
Here we go. This bidding war is sure to be fun. Google bidding for the right to protect themselves defensively. Apple bidding for the right to protect themselves offensively. RIM bidding for the right not to die entirely when that other business of their’s goes belly-up.
Had to.
