Head of BlackBerry's PlayBook Tablet Is Leaving
David J. Smith Has Resigned as the Tablet Is No Longer Supported — A senior BlackBerry Ltd. executive who was in charge of the largely unsuccessful PlayBook tablet is leaving the company. — David J. Smith, an executive vice president …
Context & Ripple Effects
The PlayBook's leadership has been bleeding out since before launch: RIM lost its chief marketing officer on the eve of the 2011 release (CMO departure on the eve of the PlayBook launch), and by mid-2012 it was trimming the lineup — discontinuing the 16GB model while still insisting it was 'committed to the tablet space.'
The retreat accelerated this spring: CEO Thorsten Heins publicly questioned the future of tablets in April 2013 (Heins questioning the future of tablets), and word spread that a PlayBook follow-up might be shelved. Smith's resignation and the confirmation that the device is no longer supported close that loop — BlackBerry has stopped pretending the tablet business exists.
First-order effects
- BlackBerry loses the executive vice president who owned its tablet strategy just as the product he ran is formally orphaned, leaving the hardware line without an internal champion.
- Existing PlayBook owners are left on an unsupported platform with no committed software roadmap from BlackBerry.
Second-order effects
- The exit frees engineering and executive bandwidth for BlackBerry's smartphone priorities under Heins — the Z10 successor and the 'crazy multi-taskers' audience he named in April — rather than a two-front hardware war against Apple and Google.
- Enterprise buyers who paired PlayBooks with BlackBerry phones lose their tablet option, nudging them toward iPad- or Android-based mobility stacks and weakening the integrated BlackBerry pitch.
Third-order effects
- If Heins' tablet skepticism holds, BlackBerry becomes the first major handset maker to formally exit tablets, testing whether a phone-centric ecosystem can survive without one in a market consolidating around iOS and Android.
- A shrinking product portfolio concentrates BlackBerry's fate on its smartphone refresh and services like BBM — raising the stakes of each remaining bet.
The trend: Struggling hardware makers are pruning failed product lines and their leadership rather than funding second attempts, with BlackBerry's tablet exit as the clearest 2013 example.