It seems that every month BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion has more bad news to announce. In November it paid a $365million charge for unsold PlayBook tablets; yesterday it announced that crucial new phones would now be delayed to the latter half of 2012, rather than being out by March.
Co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis charitably cut their pay to just a $1
each, but analysts and critics argued they’re still overpaid. One writer on
the respected blog PaidContent
blog said the pair should have been “fired months, if not years ago”.
At the heart of BlackBerry’s problems lie its troubled transition to a new
operating system: in order to compete with the iPhone and with Google’s
Android phones, the Canadian company has had to rebuild its software from
the ground up. So far, the only product using a new version is the
underwhelming PlayBook.
Yesterday, announcing RIM’s results, Lazridis delivered the bad news almost
casually. The new OS will power a new generation of phone, but in order to
compete RIM had earlier changed its mind on which chips to use. Now he said
RIM could not get enough of them and that delays were unavoidable.
Lazaridis compounded the disappointment for investors by cutting the firm’s
prediction of sales to between 11 and 12 million smartphones in the current
Christmas quarter, down from 14.8 million over the same time last year.
Others companies’ sales are rising at his expense.
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