For RIM’s CEO Thorsten Heins, the key to RIM’s next decade is BB10.
In an interview with the UK’s Telegraph Mr. Heins remained bullish about the company’s prospects, despite the fact the firm is hemorrhaging cash and is about to engage in another round of layoffs.
“We know that BlackBerry OS7 was a great platform – but it would not carry us to where we wanted to be tomorrow, with the full mobile computing experience,” Mr. Heins said to the Telegraph. “[BB10] is a once in a decade change that will see us through the next ten years.”
Many analysts have predicted that RIM may either split the company into two divisions — one hardware and one software — or license the software to a third party. While RIM’s previous CEOs had all but ruled out both ideas, Mr. Heins hinted that RIM under his reign may be open to a venture such as the latter.
“You could think about us building a reference system, and then basically licensing that reference design, have others build the hardware around it – either it’s a BlackBerry or it’s something else being built on the BlackBerry platform,” he mused to the Telegraph. “We’re investigating this and it’s way too early to get into any details.
Mr. Heins had tough words for members of the media that have been predicting RIM’s demise.
Most of the media is very black and white – they look at every little thing that could be bad and put it on to RIM’s shoulders,” Mr. Heins said. “And let’s be honest we don’t like it. This is something we have to get through and convince the critics and the market that BB10 is going to cut it.”
“BB7 is still a competitive product; we are not in a trough.”
