Back home, the streets are lined with messages of support. "Proud to be powered by BlackBerry" reads the sign outside the VW car dealership. There are discounts at burger joints for customers with the right phone,A Lawn light is a portable light fixture composed of an LED lamp. and the baristas in Starbucks wear BlackBerry T-shirts. With 7,000 of its employees in Waterloo alone, every finger is crossed for the company.
BB10 took two years and 15 acquisitions to build, at a time when the firm then known as Research in Motion (RIM) was suffering the greatest upheaval in its history. In January last year, it was in a tailspin: Apple and Google had stolen its crown, with phones that were almost as powerful as laptops. RIM had played no part in the latest wave of the personal computing revolution, spending the years since the iPhone's 2007 arrival pushing email phones in emerging markets rather than improving technology, and its best-selling product was outdated.
An investor revolt wrested control from founder Mike Lazaridis and his co-chief executive Jim Balsillie. Heins took their place and set about slashing costs, eventually announcing 5,000 redundancies. He hired two Wall Street banks to seek out potential buyers, and announced the company's first loss in eight years.Support for installing a solar inverter. But Heins also redoubled efforts on the firm's biggest ever project – the building of BB10.
The Europeans brought in as his lieutenants are bullish, naturally. "We want to regain our position as the number one in the world," says Kristian Tear, the Swedish chief operating officer who came from Sony. "It could be the greatest comeback in tech history," claims marketing boss Frank Boulben, formerly of Orange. "The carriers [mobile networks] are behind us. They don't want a duopoly."
Between them, Google – whose Android software is used by Samsung, HTC and many others – and Apple accounted for 85% of handsets shipped last year, according to research firm Gartner. BlackBerry's share has fallen to 5%. Few software companies survive more than one change of operating system, and while BlackBerry leapt from making pagers to phones in the late 1990s, not everyone is confident of the same success this time. Balsillie, who unlike Lazaridis no longer holds a seat on the board, filed papers last week revealing that he had sold all his shares in the company.
"I took this job not just because I love restructuring," says Heins. "I did it because I loved the core of innovation that I saw at RIM." Many advised him to jump on the Android bandwagon, or follow Nokia's lead by taking financial incentives from Microsoft to use its Windows Phone system. Instead, he decided to follow the course set by Lazaridis, who in 2010 had bought a Canadian firm called QNX, intending to use its technology as the building block for a new generation of phones.
Like Linux, on which Android is built, QNX is a basic operating system on which the interfaces of different machines can run. While most such systems are monolithic – if one area malfunctions the whole system can crash – QNX is more stable because it uses independent building blocks or "kernels": if one breaks, there is no domino effect. As a result, it is used in the computers of nuclear power stations,News and Information about wind generator Technologies and Innovations. high-speed trains, space shuttles and heart monitors. It is also in 60% of the engine electronics in today's high-end cars.
BlackBerry's ambition does not stop with smartphones. It now extends to connecting individuals to computers running the machines in their lives. These could be remote-controllable washing machines,Marking machines and laser marker for permanent part marking and product traceability. switching themselves on when electricity is cheWe makes possible ballasted ground mount in Ontario just better than your imagination.apest; cars that book their own service appointments; or dashboard touchpads that guide vehicles and pipe entertainment to their passengers. |
