Michal Ždanský Thorsten Heins in an interview for Bloomberg on the impending death of tablets:
"Five years from now, I don't think there will be a reason to own a tablet," Heins said in an interview yesterday at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles. “Maybe something with a big screen in the study, but not a tablet or anything like that. Tablets alone are not a very good business model.”
…said the CEO of a company that failed to sell tablets. The PlayBook has sold 2,37 million in its two years of existence, while Apple sold 19,5 million iPads in the last fiscal quarter alone. For Heins, the tablet segment does not fit in the store, so he preferred to declare it dead within five years, even though the market continues to grow rapidly.
Considering the failures and the development of the company's stock over the past five years, Thorsten Heins should be asking himself whether BlackBerry will still be around in half a decade...
I don't buy hardware, but I buy the SERVICE that the HW brings me.
Thorsten Heins and his team clearly failed to understand that tablets are not a commodity but a PLATFORM for delivering SERVICES. Nobody cares about the frequency of the processor, but we prefer the easier use of services. After all, we're lazy by nature :-) We'd rather surf on a mobile phone/tablet while watching TV than walk a few steps to the office to the laptop and wait for it to start up...
Blackberry will either disappear or be bought by someone who will use their HW to deliver their services, just as Nokia was used by Microsoft to deliver Windows-related services. I do not believe that Blackberry would change their strategy and release their concept of iTunes for Blackberry within a year, where they would offer more for less. At a time when they have a market share in units of percent, no one will talk to them about exclusivity.
The company's prospects are not governed by stock prices, as we can see with Apple shares. So if they don't have an ace up their sleeve now and pull it off in a year or two, it's time to do a whoop whoop, Blackberry.
A week ago I sold my iPhone 4S and bought a real BlackBerry. But I didn't get rid of the iOS platform, and I don't intend to either (I bought an iPad 4). I just found it unnecessary to own an iPhone and an iPad together. I have a cheaper blackberry for email and I do the rest on an iPad. So I would hate it if Blackberry fell just when I have a phone from them, with which I am quite satisfied.
black berry is already dead