RIM Firing (Nearly) Everybody

itwbennett writes "Research in Motion (RIM) reported grim Q4 results Thursday and announced sweeping personnel changes. Leading the parade of departing execs is Jim Balsillie, former co-CEO of the company, who has given up his board seat. David Yach, who has been CTO of software for the company for 13 years, is retiring. And Jim Rowan, chief operating officer of global operations, who has been with the company for four years, is leaving to pursue other interests."

Misleading title

[Anonymous Coward]

The title of this story is misleading.
There is nothing about firing in the source article.

Re:Misleading title

[Anonymous Coward]

Also it is just the executive level is leaving. The headline seems to imply the whole company is shutting down, which is not the case.

I love my Blackberry

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to say that this device is my favourite phone. I much prefer it to the iphone and android. I got fat fingers when using the iphone it took me 10 minutes to reply to an email. And for bothe iphone and blackberry I had to actually open email etc to see if I had any.

Re:Boggles mind to think about how they squandered

[jeffmeden]

Having only recently gotten into the smartphone game (July 2011), I didn't really know anything about the industry back when RIM/Blackberry was king.

But now, having read some about it... wow, what a waste. They basically had huge, fat, margins, essentially no competition in the smartphone arena, for almost five years - and freaking sat on it and did almost nothing. Meanwhile Apple and Google were in the lab inventing the future. Unbelievable.

Like most Canadians the story concerns me because what does it say about the country?

Go back and read about the NTP settlement. RIM was brutalized in a way that's hard to compare. And those fat margins? Every penny went to paying the patent troll under the bridge so they could take their phones to market.

Re:Titanic is sinking

[ArsenneLupin]

You are confusing with the Costa Concordia. Edward Smith, the captain on the Titanic went down with his ship [wikipedia.org].

Re:Incidentally

[SexyHamster]

What exactly, in the realm of productivity, is easier on a Blackberry? I'd be interested in hearing some examples :)

Good points:

• battery life, on/off schedule helps. This also prevents people from waking me at 3am
• Good default email app
• Good default calendar app
• BMM is excellent
• Easy to manage, deploy security policy for large number of devices
• Works well as a voice phone. Good call quality.

Bad points:

• For a small group of workers BES is more of a hassle than a gain
• Most of the entertainment apps are terrible. I've given up on finding one that isn't awful. This does not hinder work productivity, however.
• The UI is fairly weird. I'm not a fan of the multiple desktops that display redundant copies of many of the same icons.
• WIFI connections can be picky. Refuses to work with some WAPs

In summary:

Over all I do find it more productive than either the HTC Dream or iphone 3G I've worked with. I'm not a fan of small platform gaming so I'm not upset about not having a large set of games for the device.

Would I recommend it to home users? No, not really. Would I recommend it to office users? Meh.