BlackBerry Posts $4.4 Billion Loss, Will Outsource To Foxconn 141
iONiUM writes "Today BlackBerry announced a $4.4 billion loss, and a deal with Foxconn to outsource hardware manufacturing. One interesting stat is that 75% of sales were actually older BB7 devices. That said, CEO John Chen says, 'We are very much alive, thank you.' He adds, 'Our "for sale" sign has been taken down and we are here to stay. BlackBerry recently announced it has entered into an agreement to receive a strategic investment from Fairfax Financial and other institutional investors, which represents a vote of confidence in the future of BlackBerry.'"
Blackberry, if you want to live... (Score:5, Interesting)
...then license your tablet and phone OS immediately.
The tablet OS never, ever crashes, runs any Gingerbread app, and is a far superior experience to Android. Blackberry should give the OS away for free for any tablet that has CPUs under 1ghz (as long as the vendor writes the drivers).
The phone OS builds on the tablet, will load any .APK, runs other vendors' market apps, and is judged a far, far superior experience by Android converts. Blackberry should give the phone OS away to any vendor running CPUs under 800Mhz (as long as the vendor writes the drivers).
If Blackberry takes market share, it will win. This cannot be done as a vertically-integrated platform.
Re:Mod Parent Down (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm in canada, and we can't keep our engineers bottled up. Their 3rd year co-ops started paying more than starting faculty positions, so we had to change the rules and forcibly limit them to about 26 an hour.
Our graduates are going all over in canada and the US, starting salaries 70-80k. And we aren't a particularly spectacular engineering school. Electrical, mechanical, I don't know about civil, computer and software. (I've never had anything to do with the civil people as I'm in CS and our cross courses that I have been involved in are only with the others).
If you can't find work either people don't think your degree is legit, or you're doing a terrible job presenting yourself. Hell, our graduates who can barely communicate in english are getting great jobs.