Research In Motion’s Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie have bowed to investor pressure and resigned as co-CEOs, handing the top job to an insider with four years at the struggling BlackBerry maker.
Thorsten Heins, a former Siemens AG executive who has risen steadily through RIM’s upper management ranks since joining the Canadian company in late 2007, took over as CEO on Saturday, RIM said on Sunday.
I don’t know how much difference this will make in the short term, probably none, but at least these guys have succumbed to some of the pressure and made the sensible decision to step aside. As a Canadian i really hope they don’t get bought by a foreign company, but i guess the most important thing is that they stop sucking so massively.
Apple and Moto had a more diverse range of products and services to keep them going. RIM unfortunately doesn’t so time will tell.
I wish I could send Elop over from Nokia to replace these guys before he ruins my favorite phone brand… but he’d simply put WP7 on every phone and call it fixed, lol.
I might have bought this if it had come out 2 years ago:
This is what I was thinking. Integrate their historically good messaging apps into their Android build and they have a shot at getting back in the game.
Have a listen at this: Mike is hanging around as the Vice Chair of RIM’s Board and Chair of the Board’s new Innovation Committee. You heard right – the guy who has outrightly failed to innovate at anything in the past handful of years is now championing an innovation committee. Sounds right up his alley, no? Jim’s staying put as an outright director, and if you think anyone at RIM is going to brush aside the input of the founders, you’re wrong. Jim and Mike may have new titles, but they’re still here, and I have no reason to believe that they’ll act radically different going forward than they have in the past. Oh, and about Thorsten Heins? Let’s go there.
This guy not only had a hand in pushing out countless lackluster phones over the past five years, but he was at the top of it. He had plenty of power to make changes – radical or subtle – in what was coming out of Waterloo, and so far as I can tell, he didn’t. Color me jaded, but I have a hard time believing that the man in charge of some of the most forgettable BlackBerry handsets in recent memory will suddenly put RIM in a position to compete with and / or dominate the likes of iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
The guy looks like a 50% gayer stephen harper (Canadian PM), Thorsten Heins i mean.
I don’t know about this. Apple has a diverse product line now but when they were bankrupt they arguably had nothing as strong as the BB secure enterprise network.
and… has motorola really even come back yet or are we referring to a previous decline - resurgence?
Rim’s in a race. They’re still in a good position on paper, making a ton of money. But that’s because they’re burning through locked-in corporate users and emerging markets.
Once those locusts burn through their current crop of phones they had better have something new to feed them or they’ll all fly away. That doesn’t look good. It’s taking them 2+ years to get next generation QNX phones to market. Meanwhile they keep rehashing the same phones over and over while their competition goes through 3-4 complete product cycles.
If they even survive to bring BB10 phones to market, they had better be really really fucking awesome or RIM’s going to have to sell off their IP and pack it in.
yeah the stock price largely so low due to speculation, if the company were just emerging now people would be super excited about it… but it has declined to it’s current state and people WANT the trainwreck to happen
also, what the hell is QNX anyways? there is no way it can live up to the expectations at this point but i don’t even understand what it is.
I also remember reading that RIM bought some rad scandanavian graphical interface development company for a few million that people were super excited about recently as well.
