RIMageddon: Three end-game scenarios
A little less than a year ago, ZDNet’s Jason Perlow predicted three outcomes for the BlackBerry maker: independence, assimilation, or oblivion.
The company was given three valid options — and it still had time on its side — to pull itself out of the then-quagmire it had found itself in.
But RIM failed to adapt and compete, and announced its first ever quarterly operating loss. RIM said today it would layoff 5,000 employees, dropping the total employee count figure down around the 11,500 mark following earlier layoffs in May. It shipped only 7.8 million BlackBerry smartphones down from the 8.7 million units Wall Street expected. It isn’t even shipping BlackBerry 10, the company’s possible saviour, until the first-quarter of 2013. The only thing keeping investors on their seats was a possibility — even if it was a slim chance — of a market comeback with its next-generation operating system and forthcoming smartphones.
