Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazardis continue to skate on thin ice with investors. This quarter, they have written off losses for the Playbook of $485million. This, and other excessive losses have cause the duo to take drastic measures to garner faith from the board. The pair are effectively cutting the salaries of their entire executive team to just $1.
This is more bad news just a week after having to fire 2 executives for having a party on a plane. It that with the new plan, after firing those two, they have effectively saved a grand total of $2. Congratulations RIM.
By far the biggest upset for investors was the announcement that their new “revolutionary” operating system, Blackberry 10 will be grounded until late 2012. For those of you keeping score, that will be after the world ends, so what’s the point.
RIM has continued to face losses quarter after quarter in direct competition to Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone and iOS since the debut of the iPhone in 2007. Blackberry as a platform has struggled to keep a balance of innovation and fan-service ever since Blackberry OS 5, where the platform seems to have remained from a usability standpoint. RIM has also failed to capitalize on being the premier vendor of QWERTY, candy-bar style smart-phone –a formed factor that is being abandoned by the mass-market.
So, what can save RIM? Let us know in the comments.
Dean Howell
