Arthur reports, “The ‘didn’t really answer’ interview is perplexing from the start. Lazaridis shows up with a – or possibly the – RIM PlayBook, its tablet that’s going to launch.. when’s it going to launch, Mike? ‘We’re tracking Q1.’ Right, so… sorry, does that mean you’re launching it then, or what? That people will be able to track their deliveries from then?”
Walt Mossberg: “But look, there’s a growing consensus that your OS is dated. When will this [QNX OS on the PlayBook] become the new OS?”
Lazaridis: “By focusing on the tablet market, we see it as a way of freeing where smartphones can go.”
Arthur asks, “WHAT??”
It gets much worse and quite comical. Read the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Stalling for time while praying for a buyout.
As we wrote back in August: RIM. Dead company walking.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “krquet” for the heads up.]
I can’t believe the Canucks are THAT poorly educated.
The CEO must have been drinking before the speech!
Mo’ biggah, mo’ betta! Yeah, these guys are on to something. Make the Crackberry Playa like a big-ass Cadillac pimpmobile. Pimp it out with all kinds of gaudy crap. Oh, yeah, Flash it up, too. Gotsta have mah’ Flash! Yup. Bigger is better RIM. 17″ sounds about right to me. Crank ’em out fast. Spend your money now, RIM ’cause you just know you’re gonna beat those punks at Apple ’cause you invented the “smartphone” ans you know what customers want. This scenario just keeps getting better each day. And just wait ’till Verizon gets the iPhone. Oh, yeah…!
Canucks..drinking before, during AND after..
He just confirmed it, if the Playbook is not vaporware then it is much too little and far too late : )
I was using QNX (still have some install disks) to run industrial computers back in 1995. As I remember, it was pretty slick for its time with automatic serial device recognition, etc. I remember too that it was a Canadian company that sold it.
Aside from that, I see nothing positive here. The sales guys are in charge [death knell in the background].
Lazaridis should be a politician, he makes as much sense as most politicos and seems a master of the confused artful dodge. He even outdoes another confused and inept presentation/interview CEO subject, the bombastic and embarrassing Steve Ballmer.
:uh: Something that makes Ballmer sounding coherent needs to be handled with tons of care!… IMO
Peter Blood,
Hence MDN’s headline. Thanks for the retread, Mr. Redundant.
Lazaridis sounds sort of like an Obama voter, only he’s more logical.
He doesn’t even know his products. He doesn’t even know the company direction. Doesn’t even know the OS dev progress. He reciting some canned marketing talking points for a released product that doesn’t exist. He clearly has zero idea of his own products and progress. Unlike Steve who truly make a point to “know” his company an the products they create. He makes the time to know and not just sit at his CEO chair collecting his pay and drooling at sales reports and stock performance only.
Actually, he sounds like Palin being interviewed or at a debate.
Heard in the RIMM conference room,
Lazaridis: “Has Ballmer called back yet?”
Disaffected short-timer: “Is that in your PlayBook?”
It’s a good day to be an Apple Shareholder… RIMM stockholders better dump NOW or they inevitably have a WANG in their hands ……. UH I UM meant to sayba WANG on their hands… :-0
Since, by wide consensus, including Democrats (example), Palin “won” the U.S. Vice Presidential debate, I can’t imagine how little you think of Biden The Buffoon.
Why do some people have an irrational hatred of Sarah Palin?
Status-anxiety occurs when a person believes that their position in a real or imagined social hierarchy is threatened. Leftists react emotionally to Palin because of the threat she poses to their own individual sense of status. All their other arguments are just put forth to rationalize that emotional reaction.
In short, it is not the ideas she puts forth, its that someone like her is significant at all.
Status-anxiety occurs most strongly when a group has no meritorious claims to its social position. The classic example would be the pre-WWII European aristocrats who inherited their wealth and position, and who therefore had no right to status in an industrial society other than from cultural inertia. Closer to home, the most vicious white racists were poor and working-class whites who knew full well that only racism kept them from being on society’s bottom status tier. As long as all non-whites were judged inferior to any white person, a poor white person still had some status. They bitterly resisted losing what little status they still had.
Leftism at its heart holds that a small percentage of humans have a vastly superior understanding of everything compared to ordinary people. The point of leftism is to empower these superior individuals to impose their superior understanding upon society by the force of the state. Leftists must be viewed by themselves and others as superior human beings if they are to have a claim to power and status.
Palin’s success stabs them in the heart of their anxiety. If Palin can be a successful political leader, what does that say about the leftists’ claims of intellectual and moral superiority? If people don’t just instantly assume that leftists are smarter and better than everyone else, why would people trust a leftist government to make so many decisions about the people’s live, e.g., medical care?
That is why leftists see Palin as a genuine and significant threat of unusual magnitude. In the emotional thinking of leftists, she is a personal threat to everything each individual leftist has attained in life. They feel a sincere, visceral sense of danger about her because she attacks the very core of their egos. They feel the same hatred towards Palin that the European upper classes felt towards the upstart middle-class. They feel the same hatred that poor whites felt towards non-whites. They feel that way for the same reasons. If she succeeds, worse, if she is right, then they become nobodies.
As long as she is viewed as a significant political figure, the left’s obsession with Palin will never wane because it does not spring from rational roots. She threatens something too deep and too profound in a political subculture built around the belief that a small percentage of human beings have a vastly superior understanding of the world compared to all the rest. – Shannon Love, Chicago Boyz, September 10th, 2010
@Superior Being aka Inferior Smartass
Sorry for the redundancy. In my excitement of realizing yet another delightful opportunity to debase and defoliate Steve Ballmer I neglected to notice a similar comment by MDN. Forgive my exuberance. Frankly I don’t think we can be smugly reminded enough of the incompetence of Ballmer and other clueless CEO salesmen of his lower class.
One of my favorite quotes:
“We run a lot of platforms here — we also run POSIX natively. Lots of gaming options there.”
Oh yeah! Man, I just love my killer POSIX games!
…yeesh. You people who CAN’T SEEM TO SHUT UP FOR FIVE SECONDS ABOUT YOUR MYOPIC LITTLE POLITICAL VIEWPOINTS are totally ruining my enjoyment of, or desire to revisit, this site.
Lazaridis is just a figurehead, the money man. The other guy is the brains behind the curtains.
RIM is not looking for a buyout. They have a Canadian government that is willing to throw billions at a Canadian Icon like ‘The Blackberry Maker’. If you doubt it, Google Bombardier.
CBS just put out a notice that Mike may get his own show, “#%#>€# Lazaridis Says”
I hope they put up the video of the interview
The interview rambled so incoherently, occasionally spewing talking points for completely different questions, that one wonders if his meds just kicked in a little too hard. And the Palin analogy is dead on.
I wonder if Mossberg instantly shorted RIM from his iPhone during the Lazaridis’ speech?
The smartphone market is going to contract as players get merged and bankrupt out. RIM is not likely to be one of them if their CEO is any indication.
@Jen
Palin might be taken less seriously probably because she appears to attract clueless fans like you who would inject a completely off topic post and then follow it up with a long quote of political garbage rant.
Saturday Night Live should do a sketch on this lol. I also hope the full interview is put up w/o any editing involved. You can currently find video snippets on All Things D’s website.
LOL! MDN magic word: “end”
While reading his quotes, I imagined him as Jerry Lundegaard from Fargo. (William H. Macy’s character.) Just seemed to fit.