Would you work for BlackBerry boss Chen? He says his biz has 50:50 chance of success Will BlackBerry be able to recover from its recent woes and once again become a profitable company? To hear BlackBerry CEO John Chen tell it, the chances of his turnaround strategy succeeding are about as good as a coin toss. In a newly published interview with the Financial Times that was conducted during the Mobile World …
I've seen quite a few interviews with Chen, and he genuinely seems to different from a lot of the other tech head honchos; he knows full well the position the company is in, and he doesn't sugar coat things, he's simply trying his damndest to get the company back into the black and be a market leader in a niche field (enterprise). He know they can't compete with Apple, Samsung & Google in the consumer area (despite the fact that BB10's latest version is superb and all reviews on the Z30 are overwhelmingly positive), so he's just going to chip away at the mountain and do the best he can.
The main problem they have is reputation and perception; carriers are no longer co-operating, store staff have no knowledge of the products and of course the prevalent viewpoint is that 'BlackBerry is dead and won't be around in 2 years'.
I think if anyone can turn BB around, it's John Chen.
Well, good luck to him. The enterprise market for phones and tablets is still open for the taking. I'd have thought that winpho would have taken it by now, but no. MS don't seem to care about that right now (maybe they will with Nadella, who knows). Actually, there is still a niche market for highly practical, function before form, privacy centric, consumer phones. Also good to concentrate on the $200 market rather than the $600 one. There's are reasons I don't own an iphone, and it's mostly the price.
The biggest obstacle for the enterprise market for phones is so many decision makers are PHBs. Our whole governmental department was switched from BB to iPhones with the promise that Google would deliver a back end to match the BB console we'd been using. Four years later we still don't have the same enterprise management capabilities we did with BB. No password reset/recovery, no data backup (iTunes and iCloud are disallowed for unspecified IT Security reasons). Just the other day a senior manager came to us about backing up his Notes files. The Departmental phone people said to use a link to the Apple support page. If the sender had actually read the support page instead of just searching Google and firing of a snarky email with the link he would have seen the "this feature is not supported in newer versions of iOS" posting halfway down the page. So far the "best" solution offered: have him email the notes to himself. Which doesn't really solve the backup/restore problem.
I'm not saying the console wasn't sometimes a PITA. But even at that, it's better than our new PITA solution combined with a new and improved HiYH.
I'd like to see Blackberry claw it's way back. There are too many Enterprise MDM users stuck on the iPhone 4S and iPads. It's time for a different choice. BB needs to develop a stronger partnership with AirWatch, to insure that their products and services are compatible and offer remote control options that the other platforms don't offer.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
