Blackberry Z10 sales fail to impress analysts It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of BlackBerry, the renamed Research in Motion, is hanging on success of its new BlackBerry smartphones, the Q10 and, particularly, the Z10. Revised forecasts from a number of market watchers suggest the troubled company has not yet put its woes behind it. Earlier this week, two …
So a bunch of people who made guesses about how well something might sell have changed those guesses...and there was a range of guesses from 1/3million up towards 4million......
Clearly not a field where people care too much about what they said last week, never mind last month
I've never understood how analysts stay in business. its seems they never make mistakes, they just "revise their figures"
If my coding was consistently completely wrong I'd get the sack. I wouldn't get the chance to "revise my methods"..... ohhh and now i think i understand what Agile programming is all about and why Agile developers keep getting employed without ever delivering a finished product. :)
No, now they have some firm information on sales that indicates that those guesses were too high...
Blackberry will be dead / bought out within the year imo. The share price is heading down for its final death spiral:
http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=RIM.TO#symbol=rim.to;range=2y;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined;
Every BB owner/fan I know wants a real keyboard, and that version isn't going to be release until Q3. Unfortunately all they have released so far is an iphone/android-a-like with little app support.
Pity, as the BB does have some nice features, and a bit of competition is always good for progress (27,000 lawyers permitting).
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100% agreed. To come out with the touch screen first was kind of a sap in the face. I have one and want a keyboard version. If only I could switch. And when I was at the store trying to get it figured out 7 people came by asking for the keyboard version.
On the plus side BB support is awesome.
Well, you can get a Nexus 4 for £280 at the moment, because a company is willing to give the operating system away for free, and the same company is willing to subsidise its hardware partner to sell them around cost price. That company is, of course, Google - who make virtually all their cash from selling advertising.
If at some point in the future Google have a mobile monopoly, or decide that no other mobile platform is going to steal their search-paid-for-by-advertising business, then things could change rapidly. When you include buying Motorola, Google might have blown around $20 billion on Android (maybe more). Now as well as securing their mobile ad share, they've also got some fantastic data out of that to improve mapping, search and the rest, but that's still a considerable investment that I'm sure they'd like to get repaid. With interest.
Normal companies sell things for a profit. I strongly suspect the internet economy will be a lot more healthy when we pay for the services we use, rather than get them 'free' in exchange for our privacy or paid for entirely by a different service we use. The downside of things being routinely 'free' is that normal companies might not be able to make a profit at them, and so you end up in the situation of relying on corporate charity, or at the mercy of potentially the scariest privacy destruction machine in history. Not that we're close to that yet, but it's a point worth considering. Choice is good.
That sums it up nicely. I just took a gander at the prices over the border in Canada and saw two models of Z10, one was about CA$750 and the other was CA$1,300. The extra 500+ smacks buys UMTS 900 and quad band LTE. I have to say, I'm going to pass with those prices even when it becomes available in the US.
Supply shortages played a part, but the big deal is the public exposure, or lack of it.
The mobile networks don't want to carry it because it's actually cheaper for people to buy it direct and be unlocked. If they start pushing it, people will compare prices, have a WTF moment, and then suddenly they've lost their 24 month locked in customer to a monthly contract.
The media (talking TV news here) make a huge song and dance about a new iphone coming out and even the BB gets a mention, but a price-busting device like the N4 doesn't get a mention.
Sometimes I feel like I'm walking round with the world's best kept secret in my pocket!
I've had one for a few weeks, and I've heard every "is that the new ........" you can think of, including BB, but not a single person has said Nexus (unless I've been holding it up with the huge "NEXUS" brand on the back visible, which results in a "What's a nexus?" question). Once told the price most jaws hit the floor. I really should get a commission for the number which have been sold off the back of people playing with mine.
Or maybe I should just hold a stock of them in boot of my car!
I really wanted a playbook when it was first released but wasn't prepared to spend £400 on a tablet made by a company that made the Storm 2 - the worst phone I ever had the misfortune to have on a two year contract. It was buggy, unreliable, and was brought to market in a rush. Now that the playbook is priced a lot more realistically I suspect a lot of people are waiting for the same thing to happen to the Z10. Having tried one in the local phone shop it doesn't differentiate itself enough from any other smart-phone - I can't see not having a home or back button as a game changer. It's just too expensive even on a two year contract.
Blackberry need a lower priced smart-phone to break back into the market in my opinion.
It's a shame as I would like to see them back in the race.
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It's amazing how when you see something every day for years, it becomes invisible to you - like how these analysts (and RIM itself) can't see the writing on the wall, even though it's been there for at least three years. RIM needed compelling devices three or four years ago, when real smartphones (not blackberries) were taking off and RIM wasn't making them. It's like if Amiga or some other also-ran tried to resuscitate their brand by introducing a new desktop OS a decade and a half ago.... just totally hopeless.
At this point, RIM is a zombie, eating the shareholders' money (it's not like there are any brains to be had there...), and I'm amazed that they haven't realized this and shot it in the head (or put a stake through it's heart, or whatever you do to zombies) and sold it's assets and IP and wound down operations gracefully...
Well actually if Amiga (the company) had introduced a new OS a decade and a half ago (rather than minor updates, or a port to PPC far more recently than 15 years ago), it might have been something. And before 1996, the Amiga was solely a product, not a company.
Not sure what you mean by real smartphones and not Blackberries, sounds like a No True Scotsman...
But not for another 6 months or so. I've played with one and quite like it and also have a BlackBerry Playbook as well so a lot of the OS makes sense straight away to me. But it's stupidly overpriced, the big 3 networks seem to expect at least £42 a month for it and it's not a £42 a month phone. Three will sell you one a bit cheaper but after the experience I had trying to leave them (40 minutes to get a PAC Code and then 4 calls a day afterwards from retentions) I'd never go back to them.
I expect in the summer you'll be able to pick them up for 1/2 that price and that's what I'll do.
Analysts are just guessing. They probably are invested in Apple, Google, and Samsung, in order to maximize their own profits. They don't want or need BB to succeed. The BB strategy of selling overseas before coming to America isn't going to result in pent up demand because between now and the time the Z10 and Q10 arrive, the HTC One and other superior phones, will show up. God help BB if an iPhone pops up here before the Z10 and Q10 arrive.
Several computer ages ago, I wound up working for Digital Equipment (DEC) for a while. This was right when the nosedive was just beginning to gain speed. A lot of the company's future was based on the new Alpha CPU and the servers built on those chips. While things seemed hopeful for a while, the impact of having to get all new software if you were a VAX/VMS customer ("OpenVMS!!"), or rewrite all your software if you were an Ultrix vendor or customer ( their old software was not compatible with OSX, the new 64-bit DEC UNIX variant) seems now like a big _thumb in the eye_ of anyone remotely interested in remaining loyal to DEC at that time. It meant that anyone interested in buying the new servers would have to go "all in" from the beginning; and nobody wanted to do that with a company that hasn't proved their turnaround strategy would work. The results were, as they say, history.
Why bring this up? Last month I replaced my damaged 9800 BB slider with a new Bold 9900. Now understand that I HAD WAITED A FRACKIN' YEAR FOR THE Z10 instead of going for a Samsung SIII, just assuming that I would be able to use the Z10 with the older BES systems my company uses. IF RIM had just given the new phone a "compatibility" mode so it could work with the older BES network _still in production at my company_, I would have been fine. Instead, somehow RIM has decided that corporate and government users - their last big market; millions of users - need both new phones AND new BES software at the same time (former BB Fusion product, now labeled BES 10 from what I have read).
Again, I can understand the dependencies here, but frankly this means Rim is trying to compete with Apple and Google (their new market) with a product that their current base can't use right away (their old market). Like I said, I have (sadly) seen all this before.
YAAC
Having played with a z10 at Selfridges, the software still feels beta-esque with some rough edges, odd screen transitions and choppy animations. I can't yet see the compelling reason why you'd buy a new bb instead of a Samsung or iPhone. Hopefully time will tell, but tcfkarim doesn't have a lot of that left.
This is probably just piling on at this point, but as others have said, BB users like the product for the keyboard. They should have came out with that one first. As a proud BB user, regardless of all the ribbing I get from my friends who have iPhones and Android Phones, I am still a BB fan. I am in sales and use my phone for two things, phone calls and e-mail. BB does both better than any product out there due to the sound quality and physical keyboard. IMO, Not coming out out with the Q10 keyboard model everybody wants first was a huge mistake and they are now paying for it. No wonder RIM is losing share with poor decisions like this. Someone should be fired.
Mine is the coat with the new Q10 in it (some day I hope to say that anyway)
Like so many market leaders they're now finding themselves at the bottom of the pile with their new #DeadPhone. With so many alternatives either out there (or coming to market soon) and with corporations no longer being the solid backbone it was, I wonder just how much longer they can hold out.
Time was they *were* the device to have - no one of managerial level would be seen dead without one. Companies pushed hard to control them with their annoying problematical BES installations (well, ours was)
This is a brave new world. BYOD has changed the landscape and yet BB are desperately trying to cling on for dear life. At this juncture it seems to me that anything that IT can blow away remotely via Exchange is a big direction. Personally I'll keep my rooted Galaxy S3 off the corporate network and they won't have to worry about me :)
The sharks are circling...
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