BlackBerry Black Friday: $1bn loss as warehouses bulge with hated Z10s

Contact the Cyanogenmod people for a quick Android port

Flog the lot at cut prices..

So does that mean

I'll be able to pick up a Z10 in a fire-sale?

Just the thing to go with a playbook.

It's a shame

they should have stuck to their knitting

Blackberry makes great email devices. What they should have built was an e-ink device with a good keyboard and great battery life. Focused on the corporate market, based on security and productivity, and left the music 'n teens to Apple. This is from 2010

I know it's easier to predict than it is to solve

But I think everyone saw this coming. When your business has fallen off the radar and you have one shiny new gadget that will save you then for God's sake price it keenly. Noone in their right mind was going to pay the same for a Blackberry phone as they would for an iPhone/Galaxy.

Nokia and HTC will be delighted to have one less competitor for the 'plucky third place innovator' spot, but this whole episode is a real eye-opener about how deadly the technology market is for companies with poor leadership.

Takeover offer

Actually all they've accepted as I understand it is that Fairfax have a preferred status to offer to buy out the company for $9 per share. BBY are free to talk to other parties and could accept an alternate offer subject to a (significant) penalty fee.

At present nothing is binding on either party and they are still trying to arrange the funding to allow the deal to be completed .

May well happen - but its a long way from certain.

I have a Z10 and it's actually not a bad phone. Had BBs before from work over the years and like them. It's pretty fast, I have BBM and it's great, a secure OS, secure email, there's not a lot bad with it apart from the general media feeding frenzy b*****s because they all jump on the same bandwagon and can't think for themselves or don't want to stand out, and BB themselves not doing a great job getting it out there. But for me apps have little or zero interest. I have a few but couldn't give a monkeys really whether they had any or not. I like the Z10, and if BB go then there's less consumer choice - which is a bad thing, and I DON'T WANT an iPhone or an Andriod phone - had one and hated it. As for Microsoft, let's not even go there...

Z10 Owner, And The Only One By The Looks Of It

Jesus, I was not expecting this. I bought a Z10 2 months ago, and it's a good phone. A very good phone. A girl in the office here has a Q10, and I prefer the Z10 to that due to the bigger screen. But I can't understand the hate people have with this Z10?

Those hoping for a fire sale on Z10's, just think of this. When/if Fairfax buy BlackBerry, it will be wrapped up and sold off in bits (obviously). Will there be the an obligation for them to continue to provide BlackBerry services which the phones need in order to contact the internet while on 3G/4G? While they may be run through the mobile company, they are provisioned by BlackBerry. And trust me, if you don't have BlackBerry services then you won't be getting internet on your Z10. I should know, I had to call EE when I couldn't access the internet and they told me BlackBerry Services had to be enabled on their end. If they switch off BlackBerry Services then you're left with a touchscreen Nokia 3310. Something that will make calls and receive texts, but nothing else.

I'm watching with interest on what happens with this and their BlackBerry Services. I feel this is the critical issue now as the hardware side has all but gone now.

at least they are consistent

BBM on android, delivery date missed? Check. Compel user to rate @ 5 stars to download? Check. App not working? Check. They are architects of their own demise, just like Nokisoft.

So just like Microsoft

But without the Office cash cow money to keep them going.

I don't think people hate the Z10, I think they expect it will not get much support and end up being a dead end. Buying an expensive phone, why take a risk go for Apple or Android.

Maybe...

Maybe another way out would be to improve the existing phone.

Already manufactured handsets could perhaps use software to dovetail into users' workstations. The marketeers can call it 'the cloud'.

I would be interested if the device could connect to my PC and allow me to use my big screen and keyboard to manage data on the mobile device. Blackberry's original software was simply dreadful in this regard but it shows it's doable.

Another way to perhaps improve the phone is to find a way to make them upgrade-able to add more storage.

Right now their problem is to stop the hemorrhaging customer base. Rather than attempting to eke out a profit on stupid margins for a small number of phones sold to die-hards, they could perhaps up the value of their offerings by including things like power adapters, cases, etc at reasonable prices. Right now, the aftermarket is selling phone cases for something approaching or even exceeding the original capital layout for the device itself.

I would have *stayed* with Blackberry if they hadn't been such dicks. My Blackberry phone was a disaster and they offered no incentive to take a chance with them again, so I didn't. As a developer, I joined their network, but there was no incentive to develop for them, so I didn't.

Blackberry is still pushing around a lot of money and has a massive customer base. Perhaps if they were a bit more humble and asked their existing base to stick with them, a big chunk if that base just might stay -- if they though that Blackberry would start being a good partner.

One of the biggest opportunities here is that the other phone makers have not really set the bar very high in things Blackberry can do something about -- upgrades, add-ons, software, service and ... Their real ace in the hole could be to provide a *secure* platform for communications. This is mostly doable and they already have a better reputation for security than most.

Taking the company private? Probably a good idea for the ones who manage to scoop it up at the price being discussed. If it was me, I would be taking a hard look at their in-house developers. They went horribly wrong and it is not likely just happenstance. Their code should be much leaner and meaner and even though slipped deadlines are common in software development, these slipped deadlines and under-delivery likely put a stake through the company's heart all on its own. There is at least a profound communications gap between Management and Development, just like there is between Management and the Customer base. Probably a good idea to take an even harder look at the common denominator -- Management.

I do not want to be overly glib about the challenges here, but I think they have the resources to pull through this, but only if they really clean house.

Finally, though I don't think it met with much of a reception, as I mentioned last time and as is true for many companies, facebook is the first company they should approach. They could put Blackberry right back on the map at a stroke.

I have an employer-provided z10 and absolutely hate it. It's got the worst UI I've used in a long time. I can see why they have a warehouse full of them. I used to have a BB Bold (and a couple of earlier models) provided through my employer and while I never cared for them at least they were easy to use. My employer no longer offers the z10 as an option. I'm not surprised. I've only found two other coworkers that selected the z10 on their latest refresh and neither of them like the z10 either.

I finally ended up getting a cheap Android phone with my own money and I moved the SIM over to it. I don't really care for Android, but its UI is much better than BB10.

Sad

How the mighty have fallen.

Not in any small measure due to the sheer arrogance and blinkered attitude of the management. And of course, the pricing polices. Wannbe Apple's and more than Apple prices to match their stupidity.

Shame.

Such a bloody shame :(

This reminds me of the fall of Amiga inc.

Endless rumour, white knights and increasingly desperate predictions for a positive future whilst facing insurmountable odds resulting from incompetence.

No corporate strategy, insufficient money and operational paralysis. Shame really, I like my z10, nice phone, but *as an all round device* it's rough edged and not a patch on the iPhone 4 it replaced.

Fire sales

In the last year, I got a Playbook 32 GB for $130, a Lenovo Windows 8 (Full, not RT) 12" tablet for $300 (good hardware, but got rid of it, W8 is terrible), a Nexus 4 8 GB for $199.

BB, sell me the Z10 for $199 and I will leave Android.

Current CEO is just as bad as the previous duo...

...which is not much of a surprise as TH, hand-picked by Lazaridis, already came in carrying the virus 'lazaritis' in his blood - and acted accordingly: reluctant to invest appropriate amount of money in anything thus ending up with VERY slow development, resulting in a launch of BB10 postponed for YEARS, then coupled with a device priced WAAAAY ABOVE market realities while sporting mid-tier specs and a still-unfinished OSand messy rollout, topped off with a truly incompetent rollout mess, pathetically dubbed as "staged rollout" instead of admitting anything.

TH main concern was balancing the books, all the time, cutting on investment especially on staffing - there's no other explanation why BB was rolling out 720p dual-core device with high-end price tag with an unproven OS to a crowded, matured market without a huge marketing blitz...

...I guess the CEO's $50M walkaway package in case of a sale was way more interesting than risking a lot of money on a "go in, go big" approach paired with much thinner per-device margins (which would've probably sold a LOT MORE phone, generating a lot more users, resulting in higher market share, which in turn might have spurned better app support among devs etc etc.)

As much as I always hated the old, outdated BBOS I really enjoyed the 2-week tryout period I had with BB10.0/Z10 combo back in June (returned due to bugs, crappy Android runtime and lack of features - all that apparently have been properly addressed in the new 10.2 since!)... I'd be very sad to see such a promising OS to end up like this, ruined by one incompetent, arrogant, clueless executive fool after another...

...here I am, an early Android adopter, still hoping BB 10 will make it, in one way or another, we need competition, not to mention its endless possibilities in the fast-growing embedded world, riding on QNX's enormous existing coattails.

Very sad to see. As a business user there are two main reasons we did not go with bb10.

Firstly having to have a completely separate BES infrastructure for 10, no backwards compatibility. What were they thinking here? Cannot understand this at all.

Secondly removing the international roaming fixed monthly cost meant there was no real cost saving in sticking with bb for our traveling users.

So we have terrible business strategy in both business and consumer markets leading to the mess they are in. While it's easy to be captain hindsight, surely everyone predicted this? It couldn't go any other way.

Not surprised

To be honest I feel it is their own fault, they never listened to what their customers wanted, but though they were market leaders, but were blinkered by their own life style, did n ot notice what was going on around them till it was too late. Shame as I used to like the handset, but the software let them down.

$80 firesale = $800 unlocked at Rogers

The ripoff phone companies destroyed Blackberry as much as they did themselves in. Any smartphone attracts a ripooff plan like $65 a month at least, for what?