'Sub-arctic' atmos at RIM UK as jobs apocalypse looms

Workers at RIM European's headquarters in Slough have been warned job cuts are coming, it is understood, after CEO Thorsten Heins threatened in June to axe 5,000 staff globally. Employees were called into a meeting on Tuesday afternoon and told of the redundancies, a Register source said, adding that the cuts are deeper than …

[Desktop Mobile]

Sad news but

I can't help but feel the sooner RIM get out of hardware & sell their "services" at a corporate level the better from the whole company.

Go where you are appreciated not where you are tolerated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sad news but

I'm not sure there's a much better outcome for services comapred to hardware. Margins are somewhat better for services, but as far as I can see they are still selling hardware profitably.

RIM's problem is mainly that it is steadily becoming less significant, because it is losing market share, even whilst it has grown by 50% over the past five years or so. Margins have been hit in the past couple of years, but certainly the five year average is pretty credible, and the firm isn't haemorraghing cash like many death spiral companies. RIM doesn't have debt (or huge cash reserves for that matter), but it seems to be fading away, rather than dying on its feet.

This latest announcement is stock market driven, pushing the CEO for better results by hacking at the sales and marketing base, but that's not going to address the declining relevance of RIM. Back in the days of two CEO's the problem started, because they didn't have a plan, and that means no platform for maintaining market share. A bit like many major tech companies, I might add.

If market expectations weren't as high, RIM could claim to be a major success story, but the world currently thinks of them as a smaller version of Nokia.

[AJ MacLeod]

Re: Sad news but

Not at all - I'm very happy with my RIM phone (hardware, software and services-wise), and would happily have bought another a month ago when the contract came up for renewal. Only problem is, they stopped making my phone and don't have anything similar to replace it... not a problem for me at the moment as my existing phone continues to work fine, but I do wish someone would get a grip and produce another real smartphone with a real phone keypad.

It's not exactly a huge engineering challenge, but maybe those of us who actually use our phones primarily to make calls are an insignificant and negligible minority these days :-(

[Philippe]

Please die already

The Kodak, Nokia and RIM stories keep coming and they're depressing.

One wishes, they would just give up and leave the market to those who know what they're doing.

This endless death spiral must be a real pain for the guys still working there but when it's over, it's over..

[crowley]

Maybe it's sad, but...

I aspire to buy one of the BB10's when released.

Microsoft, Apple, and Google have all, in that order, lost my trust. And I'm bored of them.

RIM would, I'm sure, love to be as evil as the rest, but they're too weak to be so and, from what I've seen, BB10 looks like it will be a very polished offering (and I have regard for the QNX OS underlying it).

So somehow, completely unintentionally, I've lined myself up to be a first time RIM customer.

I'll abstain until I've seen the actual delivery of course, but, even if RIM are doomed, if it's any good I'll probably get one just to avoid the other 3. And I keep hearing, 'Is there room for 3 phone ecosystems?'.

Perhaps logic will intervene, but I'm not feeling logical, I'm feeling malevolent against the larger corporations.

And, frankly, I can afford to 'cut my nose off to spite my face'.

So, yes, I'll buy from the hungry one please.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Maybe it's sad, but...

RIM is Canadian, Nokia Finnish. Google and Apple are US corporations. Is a pattern emerging here?

Canada as a country has stronger privacy laws than the US, and RIM with all its faults seems to obey those laws. That for me is a reason to give them one more chance.

If you want to point a paranoid, tinfoil coated finger at who wants RIM dead, it's almost entirely American corporations who get rich off acquiring people's private data, or flogging them stuff they don't need. I suspect that Samsung felt it needed Android to gain acceptance in the US market, and that has backfired a bit.

And at least my sad little Bing maps I have to make do with knows where Dudley is, so I can avoid it.

[jai]

Re: Maybe it's sad, but...

@crowley i have an old Betamax machine around here somewhere if you'd like?.....

[crowley]

Re: Betamax

The parallel being what? BB10 will run HTML5, will presumably benefit from that Android compatibility layer, has a dev kit for any other specific needs I might have, and will be brand spanking new with all the contemporary features - excepting corporate totalitarianism.

Oh, do I need to be some corporation's bitch to load the same web pages as everyone else now?

No, I'll leave the 'iComply', 'Lunia' and 'Spamdroid' for other... 'takers', thanks.

[Paul 181]

Playbook

I hope they turn it around the PlayBook is a great device, just lacking a few major appear like skype

[Anonymous Coward]

Coincidence?

Seems a bit odd, but our Corporate IT team has just sent out a note saying we're experiencing an EMEA-wide RIM outage and there is no service currently with no estimated fix time either...

Just us, or anyone else?

[ColinX]

Re: Coincidence?

me too:

"The ability to send and receive emails and Blackberry messages (BBM) on Blackberry devices is unavailable. Internet access is also impacted.

EMEA users only are impacted.

An issue exists with external service provider (RIM) impacting multiple EMEA customers. An update will be sent when further information is available."