BlackBerry CEO: We need help from the channel to grow

BlackBerry is focusing on luring in more channel partners and developers to maintain growth, CEO John Chen told shareholders at the company's AGM. Chen has stabilised the business and jettisoned the devices unit that gave the company its name. Margins now reflect those of an enterprise software company – in the 70 per cents, …

[RobertsonCR7]

for crying out loud bring me the berries!

[Christian Berger]

Probably a great example of that kinds of things you can do wrong.

Like resting on the portable Exchange client business without broadening the use of your devices to be generic "portable terminals". If they had done this, and had opened their protocolls, they could have achieved some vendor lock-in, as software makers would have implemented that protocols into their solutions. Ideally that would have been _much_ simpler than writing a web app or some dedicated Android app.

Unfortunately they became an Android rebrander, giving you an extra insecure Android (no updates and no way to root it to use iptables). Rumours about login credentials being sent to RIM as well as having to use their proprietary backend server certainly didn't help to gain trust among security professionals.

[JohnFen]

Trust

Blackberry betrayed the trust of a lot of people, many of whom remember, then the CEO doubled down on the "you can't trust us" angle by forcefully arguing that it's a great thing that they voluntarily assist government in spying on it users.

It's hard to see how they can recover from that, particularly these days when these are issues that more people are sensitive about than ever. They can probably carve out and keep a niche in the enterprise space, but consumer will be a hard sell.