Earlier today BGR posted what it claimed was an open letter from an anonymous RIM employee to RIM executives. RIM has now officially commented on this matter, as follows:
An “Open Letter” to RIM’s senior management was published anonymously on the web today and it was attributed to an unnamed person described as a “high level employee”. It is obviously difficult to address anonymous commentary and it is particularly difficult to believe that a “high level employee” in good standing with the company would choose to anonymously publish a letter on the web rather than engage their fellow executives in a constructive manner, but regardless of whether the letter is real, fake, exaggerated or written with ulterior motivations, it is fair to say that the senior management team at RIM is nonetheless fully aware of and aggressively addressing both the company’s challenges and its opportunities.
RIM recently confirmed that it is nearing the end of a major business and technology transition. Although this transition has taken longer than anticipated, there is much excitement and optimism within the company about the new products that are lined up for the coming months. There is a fundamental business reality however that following an extended period of hyper growth (during which RIM nearly quadrupled in size over the past 5 years alone), it has become necessary for the company to streamline its operations in order to allow it to grow its business profitably while pursuing newer strategic opportunities. Again, RIM’s management team takes these challenges seriously and is actively addressing the situation. The company is thankfully in a solid business and financial position to tackle the opportunities ahead with a solid balance sheet (nearly $3 billion in cash and no debt), strong profitability (RIM’s net income last quarter was $695 million) and substantial international growth (international revenue in Q1 grew 67% over the same quarter last year). In fact, while growth has slowed in the US, RIM still shipped 13.2 million BlackBerry smartphones last quarter (which is about 100 smartphones per minute, 24 hours per day) and RIM is more committed than ever to serving its loyal customers and partners around the world.
What do you think of RIM’s response? Do you think they helped play down the ‘calling out’ of the anonymous open letter by giving end user reassurance, or was it a convoluted response signalling their separation from reality? Sound off in the comments!
via InsideBB
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I call bullshit on the reply. I see it like this, when one of my kids says this to me “I know, but (fill in the excuse here)”, that’s what I read in their pathetic attempt at a reply.
RIM, OWN THIS. Or, to quote a great line from Saving Private Ryan, “James, earn this”.
Your statement did neither.
It was empty words littered with sales numbers justifying your pathetic attempt to cover this mess up.
Shut up and fix the problem. Don’t spout sales figures, answer each and every line of the letter and detail what you intend to do about them, line by line with specifics and what your results WILL BE, not what you estimate.
Anything less and you deserve to fail and be bought out.
Do you think that the ‘open letter’ was written on company time?
There are ways to make a point, and to do it this way is just not professional (if the letter is real)
From 17,500 employees, I’m sure that everyone is not happy, or feels that the company is doing as good as they are suppose to do.
I hope that things will get better.
J.
I don’t know what to think of the open letter. it could be fake, but it does touch on a lot of things we as outsiders already see, so it’s not hard to write something very similar in point of view. If we can see it, surely the shareholders and those at the top can too, unless their egos are too big for the shoes they fill.
and the reply to the letter from RIM is standard. I mean there’s nothing wrong with being second or third. Apple has done that for years but losing all the hard work you’ve put in is a tough thing swallow.
if you’re being seen in a bad light, stats and figures always helps to eleviate it. something we’ve already seen stated and hasn’t really made an impact on us. the end user experience doesn’t care about how much blackberries you sell but it does help bottom out claims that RIM is a sinking ship when really “you’re still making money”
It is about the long term and unfortunately the delays and the transistion is hurting but geez transistions can be like that. they are all rosie!
sorry about the grammatical errors
things aren’t all rosie and it seems everyone is after a quick fix. go to android. yeah crap like that magically happens right? change all their software and security measures within a week and everything is going to be okay? Tell em their dreaming.
it would probably take months to do something like that. do you think nokia could just transition over to windows phone tomorrow. they could but that would be too quick. they have a lot invested in their eco-system to change over like that.
the reply didn’t have to happen but RIM did. I don’t think they need to tell all their plans to the world because of some open letter done by some “RIM” employee.
Let’s just hope how they are tackling it, delays and all is in the right direction. I can see the potential to stabilise and see growth like a few years ago but they really need to get their products out.
RIM has got rid of 200 people. They said that it was ‘over lapping’ jobs, and people that they no longer needed. I’m sure that if they were having a hard time, they would have let 2 or 3 thousand go.
Looks to me like they are managing things a bit better now.
So long as they get good products out the door, they should be ok. They may not be number 1, but being in the top 5 is nothing to be upset about.
ammmmmm
RIM was once on the right track, you need to build a business as a community, but sadly they lost their way because they simply forgot to keep a community prospering, you need to keep them happy, and charging more for technology that was getting old 4-5 years ago. Why is it my torch has the basically same proc as my original bold, a now 3 year old phone, I got mine late august 2008. the most common phone i see out there is the curve 85XX and even a lot of 83XX, and hardly any are 3g curves. what is that? 2g only in 2011?? they need a much more consistent performance line between phones, sorry guys, but making a phone bad so they want the better one from you doesn’t work. Look at all the current super phones out there and look at what they do. don’t ever make a phone without a flash again. get this QNX going and get it right. We all need higher res screens, Amazing input with your keyboards, torch is nice but the bold was a dream. more sensitive touch screen, nfc, LTE with 3g HSPA+ with 21mbps top speed, not 14, not 7, not 3, twenty one megabits per second and LTE to explode our brains. make a deal with or buy an optics company. Make a deal with netflix, and hulu, comedy central and anyone else to get more media on QNX. Get into the video chat game, you have it on the Playbook, build in cross the whole QNX platform and get Skype on the go, i’m sure microsoft would like to make a deal. Build SSD NAND chips in to the phone and make it a persons external hard drive. not everyone wants to trust the cloud with certain things. How absurd would a phone with 64Gb’s be, oh wait, Apple has one. how about getting back in the game and one upping the Robinsons. make a Blackberry 128 and a blackberry 256 and give them that memory in gigabytes too lol. Now that would be a sick phone. There are lots of new battery technology’s who ever gets the best one first wins. do you want to be a winner RIM?
I really hope the new High management cleans this mess up and puts out something worth while. And building materials need to be stronger. the bezel on my torch looks rancid. I would welcome a little added weight to get some real metal around here. pleaseeee even if i could by a real metal bezel and install it myself. I hate cases.. carbon fiber, stainless steal, brushed aluminum, graphene, anything nice.. maybe some gorilla class, my whole LCD is smashed too(result of a car accident and not i was not text and driving, i was a passenger, phone went into the intersection i got t-boned at.)
I would also love to see the return of the left side softkey, loved that on my bold, i used it for my flash light app.re-enforce the headphone jack, sometimes phones fall.. common problem on many devices is pout headphone jack support. Your DAC is pretty awesome but with that large amount of memory you should get some FLAC support. I will continue to support you RIM but throw me a bone here.. It is getting hard, iPhone 4 is just too pretty to people.