BlackBerry flings John Chen $89 MILLION to save troubled firm

That's a very expensive funeral....

I think it goes deeper than that. They failed to remain attractive to their core business customers and didn't manage to make themselves more attractive to the general market. They were they only choice for business for years then Apple and Android married enough to be used for business worth the attractiveness of being fun toys. They had a brief period of popularity with teenagers (for bbm) but that came and went. They just didn't change fatty enough. Either they didn't believe they had to or their culture was change adverse. Either way, the big boys at the top need to fall on their swords, they are ultimately at fault. Big payouts for screwing the pooch sends the wrong message. They get the spills when things go well, it's insane too reward them for failing, why couldn't he just have been sacked.

The Playbook was shipped before the memory requirements of BBos 10 became obvious, and he sensibly decided not to update people's tablets to a standard which would have caused fairly dreadful performance having seen the effect on the internal development Playbooks with 1GB of RAM fitted.

Playbook OS 2.1 is more than adequate, especially when you consider that the tablets were on sale a year ago for less than 90 quid.

Maybe as BBOS 10 matures it would be possible to put a less memory hungry version on a Playbook but I suspect that Blackberry are not going to devote any development effort to it now so it is most unlikely to happen.

Oh PLEAHHSE - stop whining about some update for your $100 loss-leader tablet that works perfectly fine even today. TH might have been incompetent when it came to marketing etc but he was dead on with PB: it was never meant to generate any revenue, it would've taken up a lot of engineering resources from delivering the much-needed OS v10.2 update w/ Android 4.2 runtime so he pulled the plug on the project. Considering the state of the company it was the right decision - I would've canned the project well before that, focusing instead of preventing the eventual ONE YEAR LATE debut of BB10 (mostly due to limited resources.)

Seriously, PB owners are the whiniest bunch in a long time - and I'm saying this as I still own and use couple of Touchpads + sent two more to family members, I know what some outdated sw can do to your browsing habits.

Re: beans

NOTHING on El Reg is long in the tooth and irritating with the exception of certain commentards

Ah but the secret is how to select that 30%. The value in a proper turnaround CEO or management consultant it's they have been taught a variety off arbitrary techniques such as firing everyone with more than 4 vowels in their name or the old chestnut, sack everyone whose employee numbers last two digits are a prime number.

$14 million for killing a company is pretty impressive, I could do it for half that. Negoicide pays well!

Re: Hmm.

No, because to maximise his stock options he has to get the share price up and keep it there for quite a long time.

Heins...I hope they fire whoever authorised that "compensation package".

Chen may succeed. I hope he does, because a world in which the entire mobile phone industry is based in the US, China and South Korea, and runs entirely on US-controlled operating systems, is undesirable for a number of reasons.