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Showing posts with the label mike lazaridis

Editorial: RIM, we've been here before

By now you've no doubt read or at least heard about the  New York Times  interview where RIM's co-CEOs wound up asking most of the questions and challenged conventional wisdom about the company, or seen the  BBC  interview that Mike Lazaridis put an abrupt end to (see below, if you haven't). Those both offer plenty of juicy morsels for folks like us to chew on, but they're also indicative of a broader sense of frustration from the company that's getting difficult to ignore. One that is strikingly similar to what we've recently seen from another company that grew to dominate on the world stage, became a figure of national pride in its home country, and is now struggling to reinvent itself in the face of stiff competition: Nokia. To get an idea of how similar the two situations are, we only need to look back to 2009 -- admittedly an eternity in the smartphone business, but not really  that  long ago. While Nokia still dominated the worldwide smar...

Editorial: Dear RIM, I'm your customer and I don't wear a suit

Like Joanna shamelessly admitted in her editorial a few months back, I was a BlackBerry addict. I'm also a 20-year old college student / tech-head whose phone serves every purpose from communications device to music player to TV remote. I tried to switch cold turkey and bought an iPhone 4 in August, but somewhere around Thanksgiving I gave in and picked up a Verizon Bold. I've been double fisting ever since -- using the BB almost exclusively for BBM, and my iPhone for everything else. Fast forward to late last week when I attended a meeting in New York with Tim Stevens and RIM CEOMike Lazaridis to get the latest dish on the PlayBook. As Lazaridis demoed myriad features from HDMI presentation mode to the built-in music player on the company's hotly debated tablet, it hit me: the one question I've been pondering since getting a real look at the device.  Who is it for?  At that moment, I realized the problem that's been plaguing RIM as of late -- and not just in...