The Inside Story of the Collapse of BlackBerry

The Globe and Mail has a fantastic article on the decline and fall of Blackberry. It’s so deeply reported that it’s no surprise there are three names on the byline: Sean Silcoff, Jacquie McNish and Steve Ladurantaye.

The overarching explanation of what happened, we already know: Blackberry maker RIM failed to evolve at anywhere near the speed required in the post-iPhone area, and stopped making good devices. But the story, which includes quotes from a new interview with RIM founder Mike Lazaridis, is the closest thing I’ve seen to the tale told from the inside.

This bit captures the tone-deaf hubris which did RIM in:

“The problem wasn’t that we stopped listening to customers,” said one former RIM insider. “We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did. Consumers would say, ‘I want a faster browser.’ We might say, ‘You might think you want a faster browser, but you don’t want to pay overage on your bill.’ ‘Well, I want a super big very responsive touchscreen.’ ‘Well, you might think you want that, but you don’t want your phone to die at 2 p.m.’ “We would say, ‘We know better, and they’ll eventually figure it out.’ ”

In what might be its last earnings announcement as a public company,BlackBerry Ltd. posted its biggest quarterly loss – almost all of it due to unsold smartphones.

BlackBerry announced Friday it lost $965-million (U.S.) in the three months ending Aug. 31. Having only sold 3.7 million smartphones during that time, BlackBerry posted a loss of $1.84 per share – far worse than most analysts expected, but in line with a preannouncement last week that signalled the headline numbers in advance.

Yes numbers dont lie.. and it does seem like there is no hope, but rumors have it from president and founder of 5spot Limited that the company has acquired a off shore fund of 3.8 billion from a Chinese investor, this will take place sometime next month, blackberry till then has to cut more jobs to keep some of the companies equity for the period of time. Whether this is true or not has yet to be confirmed, but it makes sense im sure we'll see some sort of backing for this Canadian company!