“BlackBerry Chief Executive Officer Thorsten Heins said he sees a limited future for tablet computers, an indication he may shelve plans to build a follow- up to the smartphone maker’s ill-fated PlayBook device,” Hugo Miller and Nadja Brandt report for Bloomberg News. “‘In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,’ Heins said in an interview yesterday at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles. ‘Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.'”
“The PlayBook, introduced in 2011, was panned by critics for debuting without built-in e-mail, delivering the tablet a near-fatal blow,” Miller and Brandt report. “Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry took a $485 million charge later that year to write down unsold inventory after shipping as few as 150,000 PlayBooks in the third quarter of 2012.”
Miller and Brandt report, “The company’s stock has experienced volatility in recent weeks following reports of lackluster demand for the Z10… In a separate report last week, Wedge Partners said BlackBerry is probably scaling back Z10 production.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Self-delusion is a dangerous game for anyone, but especially perilous for CEOs.
Call us crazy, but we’re going to go with the preeminent tech visionary of our age over some random amateur hour CEO:
When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars… PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people. – Steve Jobs, June 1, 2010
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Blues237” for the heads up.]
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