As a sidenote, all the cheering and celebration that goes on in the techpress when a company dies is somewhat disgusting. I don't understand why a large section of tech industry wants RIM or Nokia etc to fail. I would rather them see them succeed, see them build something cool and have more and fun things to play with.
edit: I think we can safely conclude that hackers are about as human and as fallible as any other group. We have our own fashions and our own tabloids.
Probably because this proves them right and the companies wrong, at the time when they refused to believe that iPhone or Android are threats to them. RIM has been very defiant about beliving that especially, but also Nokia for as long as they had their former CEO (about 4 years). "Finally failing" means that the companies were wrong, and the tech press was right all along about them, but the companies were too arrogant to admit it at the time, and now they suffer for it.
Having worked for a large "dead, but didn't know it yet" company in the past: Yup. In the later layoffs, when they had run out of dead wood and were cutting into great, productive workers, it was entirely unclear who the lucky people were. I heard of people getting axed on a thursday who were working at a new place the next week, with higher pay.
Сompanies have their reign and they die; it's inevitable. (But CocaCola didn't yet die). The problem seems to be that people's fate are too much tied to the fate of their company. Each company can be seen as trial of a business model or product idea; they monetize the idea to the full limit and then they go down.
And each death seems to be a birth for another company; look at Apple's profits and Samsungs growth.
It's also a good thing to have a company finally fail rather than just not quite die perpetually. It frees up their engineers and other talented people to go pursue a company with maybe a bigger or more contemporary vision for adding value to the world
Ie, let's take these resources away from those bad managers.
Sucks for the employees short term, but no doubt they'll be happier in the long run
I wish they weren't failing. I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if thousands of Waterloo grads suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly looking for a job, somewhat cooling down the Canadian developer job market.
Given the number of US software companies trampling over each other to hire Waterloo grads, I'm not overly concerned. I'd be more concerned for every other Canadian CS program where the interest-level from American employers is more or less non-existent (the American market being, well, incredibly healthy for now).
I've now been at multiple US companies where they pull out the stops to recruit at Waterloo, while not giving a wayward glance towards other Canadian schools. I still haven't figured out why - even as an egotistical Waterloo grad I have trouble seeing what we had that other schools don't.
Obviously sarcasm, but in reality this is not crazy. For RIM's problem is they don't know what to build, not that they are incapable of shipping something. Burning cash having engineers build the wrong thing is not obviously any more correct.
It seems like its primarily HR, Marketing, and Law getting cut. The blossoming startup scene in Waterloo and Toronto should be eager to try out any engineers that are given the boot; it's still very much a sellers market up here.
Every single one of these articles has provided no sources for these layoff figures. Sure, many of the C-Level's and SVP's have been leaving their Waterloo coop, but isn't it expected when the company has recently suffered under the current management? Surely RIM still needs it's employees to support BB7 (with devices still being launched globally [1]), while also building BB10 their next-gen OS.
Sure, their might be another round of layoffs. But almost half the company? Doubt it.
Seems very feasible if they are positioning themselves to be acquired. With 40% of your workforce gone you no longer have a business, you just have a bunch of assets. I would be surprised if they are still and independent, publicly traded company by the end of 2012.
Unfortunate, they had a lot of smart people working for them, but the dual-ceo structure ensured they would never be decisive enough to take big risks on innovation.
I find it ironic that a company called Research In Motion is going backwards as a company rather than forwards. People seem to be championing the fall of RIM and although it is their fault for being an arrogant player in the enterprise sector, it's sad to see them fail like this. While they're not dead yet, it is probably bound to happen eventually unless RIM is taken in a new direction by a CEO with balls to be a leader and not a follower trying to mimic the success of Apple's iPhone like everyone seems to be doing.
I also find it disturbing that tech outlets like Apple Insider, TechCrunch and a few other majors are basically cheering that RIM is the way it is, it's sort of disgusting to see so many supposed experts in the technology journalist field so happy to see a company like RIM fail. Arrogance aside, RIM still make great products, they just need to adapt to the changing market a bit better, ask people what they want.
"What I find ironic is that analysts who are sitting in this room will criticize this company while typing out that criticism on a BlackBerry," one shareholder said to laughs from the audience, "And I think that that’s the most self-serving, most despicable activity on this planet," he said.
They were incredibly arrogant and are now paying the price for it.
I remember going to the CUTC conference (Canadian University Technology Conference) and having one of the ex-ceos (don't remember which) lead a chant on stage of "Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo!" during his keynote. To say that alienated the conference-goers not from Waterloo would be a bit of an understatement.
From what I've heard of people who have worked there if you went to Waterloo you're golden. Almost all upper management is from there. If you're not you're going to have to fight many times harder to get promoted. It's an old boys club and an incredibly short-sighted one. Just last year I met some Waterloo people working at RIM who were convinced that the company was doing just fine, that the Blackberrys were just as good as the iPhone and the stock tanking was just temporary. They spent way too much time in their self-congratulatory bubble and now it may be too late. I could see Microsoft buying them up, forcing them to get great exchange integration and be the "Windows Phone for Enterprise" provider.
After witnessing their arrogance I definitely won't mourn their loss. I just wish my taxes and mutual funds weren't pumped into them so much.
I just feel bad for the smart people there that may be out of a job soon.
And yes, most of my desire to see them succeed is because a lot of public money is invested in them, and it would likely send a ripple effect across the tech sector in Canada (specifically the Waterloo area).
What's actually wrong with Windows Phone other than it came from MS? From what I've seen of it, its a well designed well executed mobile OS. You can't really say the same of the recent blackberry os releases.
Because that's just one more smartphone OS that will never support app development from anything other than their own creator's platform, i.e. Windows and Visual Studio or Mac OS X and Xcode. The world doesn't need this horrible, closed-system, innovation killing, walled gardens crap anymore.
My girlfriend got a windows phone recently, by far its one of the best mobile operating systems I have ever used. She's hates computers and loves the phone. Microsoft did a good job on the OS.
Well, people are too quick to jump on any stories blasting RIM nowadays. We should rename HN to "Questionable Hacker Rumors".
For one, it is a rumor. Apple Insider isn't exactly known for well placed sources inside RIM.
Second, even if we were to take this at face value, read the text: "The layoffs will affect the company's legal, marketing, sales, operations, and human resources divisions, a source said." Not that engineering isn't mentioned. That is a good cutting of cruft.
This may go against what lots of tech. people like to think (it's certainly a much sexier idea to think of a good company as one run by and only employing hackers), but just for the record there are people in many departments, including legal, marketing, sales, operations and HR, who are both talented and useful at companies.
The fact that RIM clearly has a lot of cruft to cut doesn't mean that a.) that cruft is all, or even mostly, outside their technical staff or that b.) of the non-technical cruft, those getting fired are part of it.
I don't think they lack in research, or at least spending on research. I think the main thing they lack is a culture of innovation. They sat on their laurels as the market leader and they avoided cannibalizing any of their revenue streams.
That's a good point. Many companies are either too unfocused with their research, so whatever they are researching is almost completely irrelevant to their business, or even if they do invent something innovative, it's the managers who don't give the invention any chance for fear they might disrupt their current businesses.
This is really sad. Their dev tools were really horrible though and they weren't able to come out from their nice of mail and messaging which other smartphones started doing as well if not better leading to a BYOD(Bring your own device) culture at the workplace. Who wants to carry two phones and keep them charged?
On the bright side, they're still making money with a steady and increasing BIS revenue stream, BBM is getting popular in Europe and Asia and BB10 is on the horizon, I doubt it can save them unless BB10 is leaps and bounds better than the rivals. They have improved the user experience and the dev tools, but remember what happened to Palm with their excellent WebOS, it's really hard to sell phones because of network effects and few available apps(chicken and egg problem).
With the lack of apps I feel no sympathy. I was working on and off with a company trying to get a well known app onto their store. Because of onerous T&C's that essentially said they had rights to revenue we made in app, our lawyers asked us to have this clause amended. Initially I thought no problem, we have done this a bunch of times and it is usually a quick turnaround. It took over 2 years of faffing about and was by far the worst app store experience I had to deal with.
I looked at doing BB development when it was it's prime. It was too expensive to get into and the cost of a BB enterprise server was prohibitive for a amall shop.
It's been a while since I've looked into it, but last I looked, all the required tools were free/open-source, and the only requirement to be a BlackBerry developer is/was a $20 signing key.
BB10 has the WebWorks platform for HTML5/CSS/JS ninjas and Cascades which makes writing with the Native SDK a breeze (coming from a current Android dev who is really considering the switch).
edit: I think we can safely conclude that hackers are about as human and as fallible as any other group. We have our own fashions and our own tabloids.