It spread across the web like a wildfire. When RIM’s new CEO, Thorsten Heins, said he didn’t “think any drastic change is needed,” people started to think he was on something. After all, Blackberry has fallen out of favor with the smartphone industry and RIM’s attempt at the tablet industry didn’t pan out so well.
As it turns out, he was misunderstood or something. So to clarify things, he had this to say in a recent interview with CrackBerry:
“I think this got into a little bit of the black and white zone. I was talking about drastic or seismic changes. What I was trying to address was that there was some suggestion that RIM should be split up or should even be sold. My true belief is that RIM has the strength and the assets that we can really succeed in this market.
There is a LOT of change. There is a lot of structure change, there has been already a lot of change in terms of our software, our software platform, bringing QNX in. There is no standstill at any moment here at RIM.
What I wanted to make clear to the market is that we believe in our own strength, we are BlackBerry, we are an integrated solution, hardware, software, services, and network.”
It’s a fact. RIM was once a giant in the mobile tech industry. It’s also a fact that when it comes to a pie chart dividing the market, RIM has one of the smaller slices, if not the smallest. According to Mashable, its market share of the smartphone industry dropped from a solid 30 percent around the beginning of 2011 to a mere 7.1 percent and then to 6.5 percent between September and November 2011 alone. Around this time, Apple saw growth to about 30 percent. See the flop?
With that in mind, it will be nice to see what path RIM takes in 2012. Will they reinvent themselves altogether? Make “strategic” acquisitions? Or even higher new talent? Let’s see how this pans out for the once dominant mobile force.
