The switch over was a surprise announcement yesterday.
They've just had a brand problem for a long time where nobody had heard of RIM.
I must have heard it here or something and confused myself into thinking it happened a while back.
Well they don't need to maintain marketshare, they can survive just by selling secure devices to industries where secure devices and management is required - and really, Windows Phone is their biggest threat here.
The new phones and software cost them a pretty penny to develop and will continue costing them for a while yet. If they don't prove to be decent hits then it might not matter how profitable their other divisions are - particularly if they keep feeding resources into the the phone/OS to help them gain market share.
At some point, they will make awfully tempting targets for a leveraged buy out or just be straight out swallowed. Their patents and other intangibles will have worth not reflected in their stock price and with their capital drained trying to push failing phone lines, they won't be able to fight back.
I don't have a crystal ball or anything, but there have been ample warnings that management there don't have a solid grasp on how to keep the entire ship afloat in a rapidly shifting market. They have been throwing money (and more importantly) time away trying to chase what everyone else is doing much more competently. That's the spiral of death for tech companies with already thin margins.
There's cell phone threads in both sections. The computer is a deeper device with a section very specifically designated to it. The phone is a different item and could be covered in one or two threads under technology.
Like I said, tell a mod about it.
It is possible that general market growth and leaving users will outpace returning and new users for blackberry. Do you think they would've been better off not releasing bb10, or not even starting with development in the first place?
Youre first question - yes I think it is possible. I wouldn't know how likely it is, I really depends on how many business users have moved beyond BB. If they've found a good substitute, they're likely to stick with it and for naturally conservative procurement and IT divisions of largish companies, they aren't likely to go over to (or even stick with) BB if there is a non-trivial chance BB will fold or be bought out. They can't justify that risk to a corporate board of directors (who are even more conservative than themselves) when viable alternatives abound.
After having stepped out of the game for effectively a year and half, there is definately viable alternatives popping up and the Apple's, Microsoft's and Googles of this field aren't going to sit around and wait for BB to make a comeback. They're moving aggressively to do what BB did better than BB for business users.
To your second question - I think they should have not begun developing BB10 and new phones. I think after the whole email shut down debacle and all of the development hiccups they've had, they should have started looking for buyers. Their shareholders are going to have to eat a lot of lost value as their stock price plummets (assuming the new releases don't go that well).
They should have sold or at least divested the parts of the business that weren't going to make money in the short term in order to prop up profitable service divisions. They were focusing on the long term viability of the company when they went into BB10 development and these new phones, they weren't thinking about the shareholders. If they were thinking about the shareholders, then they were just seeing through glasses so tinted as to make them blind because their approach to long term viability is to keep doing what they've been recently failing at.
