BlackBerry Back In Profit 67
An anonymous reader sends word that BlackBerry, hit hard over the past several years by the emergence of smart phones, has come back to profitability.
BlackBerry has been fighting an uphill battle to stay relevant in the world of mobile devices. It has lost market share to Apple, companies like Samsung that offer gadgets running on Google's Android operating system, and Microsoft. But John Chen, who took over as CEO in November, has injected new life to the company. Chen, who says BlackBerry is getting close to breaking even on its hardware business, has steered the company's focus more towards software. He's made several product announcements that Wall Street has cheered. Last month, the company launched its Project Ion, an initiative to develop more connected devices ... a trend dubbed the Internet of Things. On Wednesday, BlackBerry reached a deal with Amazon that will let users of BlackBerry's newest operating system access Android apps in Amazon's appstore later this fall.
Blackberry - only vendor serious about security (Score:5, Insightful)
Blackberry may make a comeback as the "big business smartphone". All the other smartphones are slaves to Apple or Google or a carrier. Blackberry phones are slaves to the enterprise Blackberry server, and Blackberry itself doesn't see phone traffic. Blackberry is the only major vendor serious about security and encryption. Everybody else is into advertising revenue.
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They are serious about security or compression? I think it was latter. Compression was necessary to minimize data usage. Back in the days where GPRS was considered extremely FAST. They needed compression to make communication on their device bearable. I think security was an after thought. Just my opinion.
Having said that, a BB10 is not much different comparing to other smart phones in term of how it is retrieving w
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Certainly they were - the old Blackberry OS was FIPS-certified. At the time, about 3 years ago, it was the only phone platform we could find that matched the government security requirements the company I worked for needed for a tender, and that was unfortunate, because the old OS is shit and horrific to program against.
I do not know if the QNX-based OS was ever secured as tightly as OS7.
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Neither iDevices nor androids have the FIPS-certified seriousness of the classic blackberries; but both have been receiving their share of attention from vendors interested in (either at the level of a single app that speaks EAS and refuses to talk to system-wide storage of contacts and other information that would normally bleed the first time somebody downloaded the SpamSocial app of the day, or on the level of 'MDM' stuff th
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Selling your eyeballs and your habits are pretty strictly in Google's and Microsoft's purview.
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Selling your eyeballs and your habits are pretty strictly in Google's and Microsoft's purview.
Yeah, not so much. [apple.com] Though based on news reports they're not not very good at it [macrumors.com] yet.
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iAd is the coolest, most advanced advertising delivery platform not used by anybody.
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iAds? They're a joke. First, Apple doesn't give out customer information - at least not to the extent the competition (i.e., Google/AdMob) does. And the exorbitant buy in fee?
To be honest, I think the ONLY reason Apple has iAds is because Google is paying Apple off. Remember when the DoJ was investigating Google's purchase of AdMob?
Re: Blackberry - only vendor serious about securit (Score:2, Insightful)
Right. Super serious about security, enough to give the decryption keys to any country that asks. I feel very safe knowing the Indian and Saudi governments can read any of my messages.
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Oh, yes. Companies like Blackberry, Apple, Microsoft, et. al. should all be "digital anarchists" and rebel against the governments of the countries they sell products and services in because you say so.
How about you put your ass on the line against those governments?
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BTW, that happens to include "friendly" governments like those of the UK, US, Canada, and Australia.
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Actually, they can't read all messages. Even RIM can't read all messages.
There are two modes a Blackberry can work in - BES mode and BIS mode. BES mode is when your Blackberry is attached to a Blackberry Enterprise Server machine. What happens in this case is all traffic between your phone and BES is encrypted with a per-devic
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They are so serious they let UAE/India/Saudi Arabia etc snoop on BB traffic.
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They are so serious they were the last company in telecom to let UAE/India/Saudi Arabia etc snoop on BB traffic.
FTFY
The only reason you heard about BlackBerry caving was because they fought it for 3 years. All the other carriers and OEM's had already capitulated or were so insecure India didn't even have to ask. So yea...they care about the security of their customers. And FYI that was only for BIS traffic. They designed BES specifically to prevent anyone, even BlackBerry, from compromising their security.
Re: Blackberry - only vendor serious about securit (Score:1)
Bogus turn around. (Score:1)
The CEO cut his way to profitability [google.com]. Its an old cheap trick that usually helps only the CEO's bonuses/compensation and in the meantime, hurts the company's long term prospects.
The deal with Amazon? Pfft. BFD.
RIM/Blackberry will be back in the red by year end.
RIM is mostly dead and even Miracle Max can't help them.
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The CEO has proven that, underlying Blackberry, there is a real profitable business which is swamped by development costs.
Not necessarily. It depends on what it is that was cut. The problem with cost-cutting and downsizing to get into the black is that it is hard as an outsider to tell the difference between cutting genuinely unnecessary overhead and gutting the organization. If the cuts are just general downsizing, any appearance of increasing profitability is temporary and illusory. A useful oversimplification is that you essentially spend money now to make a product you sell tomorrow, whether it's in R&D now for product
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They are doing the "sell the properties we own/lease them back so we can continue to do business" thing for another short-term cash injection...
Outside of North America (Score:3)
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Re:Outside of North America (Score:4, Insightful)
That was not Brazil, I assume. I've only seen a Blackberry here once, in some in-store kiosk, years before smartphones became mainstream. Nowadays, everyone has Androids, iPhones, even WP, while Blackberry has vanished.
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If they do manage to be 'emerging' in the sense of actually getting wealthier over time, you'd better have a compelling reason why they should continue buying from you, rather than starting to buy the toys that they couldn't previously afford, which (barring some significant cultural variable) is a very real possibility in Blackberry's case since those toys have already demonstrated the
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The school kids on my bus in the morning used to spend their journeys using BBM on their blackberries. Now they have cheap Androids and converse on WhatsApp.
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Re:Only keyboard smartphone (Score:5, Interesting)
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Except for all of the content creation that is happening on iPads. There is a lot of content outside of what is best made with a physical qwerty keyboard. It might not be a majority in any field, but it is certainly far from nonexistent and not as simple as the black and white dichotomy sound byte people like to repeat.
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And you know what... the "sales engineer" looked like a complete retard typing on the thing. Couldn't believe he worked in a development shop because it was like watching a car mechanic type up your invoice details after some repairs; painful. I really wanted to hand him my laptop and ask him to switch to it.
There may be some content being created on tablets, but by and far, it is used for consumpti
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That's why I said "outside of what is best made with a qwerty keyboard". I am not arguing that the iPad is just fine for all content creation. Not all content is typed, and I specifically excluded typing for a reason. For example, I have heard a lot of musical people are performing and composing with iPad apps. In fact, composing on the go can be easier on an iPad than on a laptop, as a qwerty keyboard is definitely not optimized for musical note input whereas an iPad app can display a piano keyboard for in
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The majority of the iPads I see have physical keyboards. I doubt they're as good as my desktop keyboard, but they're a lot more portable.
If only financial engineering was a viable product (Score:2)
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Do your Android using friends have high end models like whatever the latest Samsung Galaxy is? Because Android has become the favorite OS for low-end crapphones foisted on people who would have opted for a simple flip phone but are forced into buying a smartphone because nobody makes flip phones anymore. I would not be surprised if those phones sound like crap, but it would be odd if flagship Android phones had poor call quality as well.
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My personal phone is a nexus 5. I was given a blackberry z-10 as a work phone. In almost every way I prefer the Android. Better keyboard, better predective text. better sound quality, better screen, better camera...
I do like the blackberry hub, and in some ways I like the Blackberry approach to email.
In summary, I would say the Blackberry is a decent communication device and a crappy pocket computer. The Nexus 5 is an excellent pocket computer and a decent communication dev
Curious definition of "Profit" (Score:2)
The slashdot headline says "..Back in Profit." Unfortunately not so.
The original article is informative. Under Chen's leadership Blackberry has
increased their profitability so they are no longer losing so much money.
They are, however, NOT PROFITABLE. Their loss prior to some accounting
tricks (that will make the number worse) is $0.11/shr. That means an
investor holding 1000 shares just lost $110 (if he/she sold them).
While profitability as a measure of how well a company performs is good,
and acknowledgin
Don't need Amazon appstore; BB can access Google's (Score:4, Informative)
That's unpossible (Score:1)
"more profitable" doesn't mean "making a profit" (Score:4, Insightful)
The slashdot headline says "..Back in Profit." Unfortunately not so.
The original article is informative. Under Chen's leadership Blackberry has
increased their profitability so they are no longer losing so much money.
They are, however, NOT PROFITABLE. Their loss prior to some accounting
tricks (that will make the number worse) is $0.11/shr. That means an
investor holding 1000 shares just lost $110 (if he/she sold them).
While profitability as a measure of how well a company performs is good,
and acknowledging that LOSING MILLIONS is a lot better than LOSING
HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS (see e.g. Radio Shack)... Blackberry has a
long long way to go.
The article ends with the two avenues Blackberry is pursuing: hardware and
software (how inventive, right?)
- Hardware: they're going to try and create Internet enabled gadgets. As
Blackberry's core hardware competence has always been its bundled
business services this is a big departure. They fight uphill against
Samsung watches, Apple gizmos, Google's Nest, etc.
- Sofware: They bought the right to allow their product to access the
Amazon Play Store (android apps from Amazon only). The win here
is they prove their product REALLY CAN run android apps. The lose
is that instead of opening it up to the Google Play store (most
android apps) they've allowed a limited (by Amazon) subset of apps,
and most designed to siphon extra $$$ and hand them off to Amazon.
This is something we can expect to see Amazon touting as a win in
it's 10Q.
I wish them well. I was surprised by the headline. BlackBerry is
doing well to reduce loss, and less loss is higher profitability, but
they're still chewing threw their cash and unless they stem and
correct that they will be gone.
E
Dead company walking (Score:2)
Selling phones below cost and major cost cutting doesn't turn into a positive long term trend. It just gets the CEO paid well for a while, nice golden parachute and lines them up for a job with a company that actually has a chance of surviving.
I like blackberry. Good solid hardware. The OS is far better than ios or android, at least until recently. The security is excellent.
But they rested on their laurels too long and everything they're doing now is too little, too late. I'm sure that certain vertical