According to a Globe and Mail report, Research in Motion is preparing to cut 2000 jobs or more by June 1st, one day before its first quarter ends.
Research in Motion currently has about 16,500 employees and this round of layoffs marks the second major reduction in force this year for the BlackBerry maker.
[Read]
I was just listening to a podcast where they said that BlackBerry is down to 7% global market share and falling compared to 82% held by Android and iOS.
Something tells me that these aren’t the last of the layoffs.
The reality is that RIM is headed for corporate death; they are lucky if they survive to the extent that Palm did. They too have been superseded by other technology players.
That’s pretty bad, seeing how Palm didn’t survive.
What is funny is there are companies willing to buy them out, but they do not want to be bought out. I think Amazon, was interested. Canada will not stop them from selling the company.
No one is going to want to hear this on a BlackBerry Blog, but, here is what RIM needs to do to have any shot.
1. Scrap BlackBery 10
2. Start selling their network services to third parties.
3. Start building Android devices with its own UI like Amazon did and lock it down to make it secure.
4. Pray..
I’ve thought for a long time that RIM should have moved to Android. I dare say that most consumers really don’t care about the OS so much as they care about the apps that run on said OS.
Three things really come to mind when you think of the BlackBerry, the keyboard, email, and BBM.
It seems to me that RIM would be a lot better of if they simply had given up on creating their own OS, and, just gone with a secure version of Android which could run BBM and their email service…