RIM CEO on What Went Wrong and the Future of BlackBerry
In an exclusive Q&A, CIO.com's Al Sacco chats with RIM CEO Thorsten Heins on the current state of BlackBerry and how it fell from grace, what the company is doing to ensure things in Waterloo don't get worse, and the product delay problems that have plagued RIM.
Context & Ripple Effects
Thorsten Heins inherited a company already stripped down: the co-CEO structure was dismantled in late 2011 after months of pressure to fire Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, critics had spent January 2012 arguing that denial was not a turnaround strategy, and by March the Q4 miss had pushed Balsillie off the board entirely along with the CTO and COO. This CIO.com Q&A is Heins' first extended public accounting of how BlackBerry fell from grace and what he intends to do about it.
The pickup list shows how far the story travelled beyond gadget press: Bloomberg framed it around corporate customers drafting contingency plans for life without BlackBerry, while the New York Times flagged the possibility that the latest product delay could expose RIM to lawsuits — an unusually legal-and-procurement-shaped reception for what is nominally a CEO interview.
First-order effects
- Enterprise customers named in the Bloomberg pickup are actively working on contingency plans, meaning RIM's most loyal constituency — corporate IT departments standardized on BlackBerry — is now formally planning exits rather than waiting on BB10.
- Heins' admission of repeated product delay problems hands ammunition to frustrated customers and partners; the New York Times pickup suggests those delays could carry contractual or legal consequences, not just reputational ones.
Second-order effects
- Every quarter of slippage pushes RIM's installed base toward rival platforms, so Apple and Android handset makers capture the enterprise accounts RIM built its business on — and carriers lose the one vendor that gave them leverage against both.
- If corporate buyers hedge, RIM's services revenue — the high-margin backbone tied to BlackBerry devices — comes under pressure alongside hardware, forcing cost cuts deeper than the March executive purge.
Third-order effects
- The episode marks the end of the model where one vendor controlled both the device and the secure enterprise channel; if Heins cannot hold corporate accounts, enterprise mobility consolidates around multi-platform management rather than any single handset ecosystem.
- A CEO interview becoming a story about customer contingency planning and potential litigation signals that RIM's fate is being priced by procurement officers and lawyers as much as by reviewers — the point at which a platform's decline becomes self-reinforcing.
The trend: Enterprise mobile computing is shifting from BlackBerry's single-vendor, control-centric model toward multi-OS fleets managed independently of the handset maker, with each RIM delay accelerating the migration.