RIM ended last week in more self-inflicted disarray. It announced a huge write-down of unsold fondleslabs, a sizeable operating loss, waved goodbye to its co-founder and its CTO, and then had to spend the next two days clarifying that it wasn’t deserting its most loyal users.
All in all, that’s quite a bad run. And everybody knows it’s going to get worse. There’s no shiny new kit running the brand new OS (BlackBerry OS 10) until November. Everyone knows this. But there's another problem. Unless the new RIM CEO receives a rapid course in Speaking Like A Human, people aren't going to recognise any good news when they hear it.
Reporters following the quarterly earnings call all decided that the big story last week was RIM pulling out of the consumer market. With the English rioting season fast approaching, it couldn’t have been more badly timed. In the UK market it is consumers under the age of 25 who keep the BlackBerry flag flying – consumers who’ve bought the devices themselves. In fact, RIM isn’t abandoning them at all – as the transcript confirms [1]. But thanks to CEO Thorsten Heins’ stunning lack of clarity, there was enough ambiguity to allow reporters to run their story.
