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CEO change at Research In Motion
Posted in Announcements about 3 months ago by Robert - Comments (3)
"We will take this to new heights” - This is a Bold statement from the NEW Research In Motion (RIM) CEO Thorsten Heins. Blackberry Smartphone manufacturers RIM have announced a change in CEO. The shake-up at the Canadian company will mean Mike Lazaridis who was founder of RIM and co-CEO Jim Balsillie will both step down. Now steps up Thorsten Heins, who joined RIM in 2007. He has risen through the ranks from Chief Operating Officer, Product Engineering, overseeing the Blackberry smartphone portfolio world-wide. Heins previously worked for Siemens as the Chief of Technology in 2007 and holds a master’s degree in Science and Physics. Will his vast experience be enough to spearhead Blackberry into a new era?
The change up is due to recent struggle in Blackberry sales and the embarrassing outage. The outage at the end of 2011 that troubled users all over the world, experiencing problems, sending ,receiving, using BBM and also internet and data problems. This outage left a lot of users feeling that this shouldn’t happen with a Billionaire company and a secure system. This then lead to the outage being the number 1 #trendontwitter, which was embarrassing for the company.
Another blow was the flop in sales of the Blackberry Playbook which didn’t hit the heights hoped with consumers. This leaves a huge mountain of pressure on Heins to deliver in 2012 as many loyal Blackberry users feel as though they are falling behind the other major manufacturers. The new CEO stated that the company doesn’t need drastic change. He also mentioned that he won’t split up the company. "I will not in any way split this up or separate this into different businesses," Mr. Heins said. "If there [are] requests coming towards Research In Motion to talk about licensing that platform to other companies, I will entertain those discussions. I will listen." I would agree with Heins to some degree as I think they do need some things tweaked to make Blackberry a front runner. I do believe though that they need to step it up fast or risk falling behind further. Let’s look at the positives and negatives of the Blackberry smartphones:
Negatives
- Browsing is still slower than the rest of the new smartphones
- Lack of apps, means less interesting
- Too many devices out, leaves everyone confused. Eg. Curve (9360) this should be called something different so it’s easier to identify. It being a touchscreen, in my opinion means it should be a torch or storm.
- Operating system is still a little slow and lagging as same with touchscreen.
Positives
- Emails – Sending and receiving emails, I feel Blackberry is the best. Using the QWERTY keyboard is excellent for this.
- Blackberry Messenger. I’ve yet to see a more popular messenger. Easy to use, share pictures, video, notes etc. Uses very little data due to compression
- Blackberry Bold 9900 is the best Blackberry yet. Looks very sleek and cool. The keyboard is the best I’ve used on any phone. I feel the touchscreen and QWERTY is the way forward for Blackberry. It’s a great balance between touch for internet browsing and keyboard to type long emails etc.
What will 2012 bring for RIM and Blackberry?
In a recent interview with Thorsten Heins he discussed a new Playbook 2.0 OS update. He mentioned that they need to use powerful marketing to help get back on track.
Blackberry 10 platform is something that is being worked on at the moment. Heins states that it’s unheard of for a company to create a new platform within one and a half years, but he’s very excited to see it. There isn’t anything I’ve seen so far that details what Blackberry 10 will consist of and what features and capabilities it will bring. RIM are expected to release a new Blackberry Bold smartphone running on Blackberry 10. The new handset is expected in December and will have touch-screen and QWERTY keyboard facilities.
2012 will be a huge year for RIM and Blackberry, I hope that Thorsten Heins can pull it off and take Blackberry to new heights.
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