Beleaguered BlackBerry CEO: ‘We are here to stay’

10 years ago

“BlackBerry Ltd is ‘very much alive, thank you,’ Interim Chief Executive John Chen affirmed in an open letter on Monday in which the smartphone maker committed itself to rebuilding as a niche player concentrating on the enterprise market,” Reuters reports.

“Chen took over as CEO a month ago after BlackBerry abandoned a plan to sell itself,” Reuters reports. “‘Our ‘for sale’ sign has been taken down and we are here to stay,’ he wrote in the letter that was addressed to ‘valued enterprise customers and partners.'”

“BlackBerry, once the market leader in on-the-go email, has suffered a drastic loss of market share to Apple Inc’s iPhone,” Reuters reports. “Its new smartphones have so far failed to win back customers, as Chen acknowledged in the letter.”

“BlackBerry has laid off thousands of workers over the last two years and in September it said it would shed more than a third of its global workforce and refocus itself on the enterprise market – large business and government clients – that vaulted it to prominence in the 1990s,” Reuters reports. “‘We’re going back to our heritage and roots, delivering enterprise-grade, end-to-end mobile solutions,’ said Chen.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Make that “delivering enterprise-grade, end-to-end mobile solutions for Apple’s iOS while continuing to dramatically downsize operations” and you might have a slim chance of surviving as a niche player.

Still, this rudderless, unstable mess of a company has been making a lot of promises and not delivering ever since being run over by the iPhone steamroller, so it’s going to take a lot for the enterprise to consider whatever beleaguered BlackBerry is trying to peddle this week instead of just going with Good Technology or whatever established company is already doing whatever Amateur Hour Inc. daydreams about dabbling in at the moment.