Tag

blackberry

Technology

November 4, 2013

BlackBerry CEO steps down as company secures $1 billion funding from investors

Chen, BlackBerry’s new interim leader, comes with strong credentials. He most recently played an instrumental role in turning around the fortunes of Sybase, a company that was once in a similarly distressed state to BlackBerry’s current plight. His experience in the mobile enterprise business will be an asset and could potentially point to the future direction of the company. John Chen is also taking up the role of Executive Chair of BlackBerry’s board, immediately taking on a great deal of both power and responsibility.

Mr. Chen seems like a fantastic choice for the company. He definitely has the leadership background that Thorsten Heins lacked. Hopefully, this new CEO can turn the company around ASAP.

Google Employees Confess The Worst Things About Working At Google

Google may understand engineering, but not design.

“There is not enough focus on product and visual design.  This has led to many aborted/semi-successful products, like Wave, Google Video, Buzz, Dodgeball, Orkut, Knol, and Friend Connect.  There is probably too much focus on pure engineering.”

Now it all makes sense. Kind of.

Western Digital enlists helium for 6TB energy-efficient drives

The lower turbulence also increases the drive’s capacity because more platters can be squeezed into the 3.5-inch housing. Today’s 4-terabyte models use five platters and top out at 4TB, but the Ultrastar He6 has seven platters and reaches 6TB of capacity. That’s also useful for data centers where space is at a premium.

These would be amazing in my 5-bay RAID 5 array.

Usain Bolt Ate 100 Chicken McNuggets a Day in Beijing and Somehow Won Three Gold Medals

In the ten days Bolt spent in Beijing, he downed approximately 1,000 nuggets, averaging 100 a day. At 940 calories per 20-piece box, that means that Usain ate about 4,700 calories worth of Chicken McNuggets a day and 47,000 calories over the course of his stay in China. (And that’s without Sweet ‘N Sour Sauce, which, let’s face it, only a fool would pass up.)

There must be something in the nuggets. Or he just didn’t want to eat anything else China cuisine had to offer.

2013/11/04
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Inspirational

October 15, 2013

Apple hires Angela Ahrendts as new retail chief

“She cares deeply about people and embraces our view that our most important resource and our soul is our people. She believes in enriching the lives of others and she is wicked smart. Angela has shown herself to be an extraordinary leader throughout her career and has a proven track record. She led Burberry through a period of phenomenal growth with a focus on brand, culture, core values and the power of positive energy.” – Tim Cook

I’m actually really glad that Apple finally found a good person to take over the role of Senior Vice President of Retail & Online Stores. I’ve seen Angela’s TED talk on “human energy” and I believe that she is an excellent pick. She is the current CEO of Burberry and I’ve been noticing that Apple has been hiring from great places like Nike and Yves Saint Laurent. I wish her the best in her new duties.

Apple’s hire of Ahrendts shows its future is in lifestyle , not tech

By hiring Ahrendts, Cook and his team are signaling their desire to keep Apple just as fresh and upmarket as Burberry.

Overall this is a fantastic analysis of what Ahrendts brings to the table. However, the title of the article makes it sound like Apple isn’t interested in the technological aspect of the industry. I must strongly disagree. Ahrendts is known to be very serious about technology. We must remember what Steve Jobs said: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” This is exactly what the Burberry CEO offers. She is a exceptional balance between the humanities and tech. This is what separates Apple from Google, Microsoft and the rest.

GoBaddy buys Media Temple

Part of the reason for this, GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving says, is because of Media Temple’s existing size and position in the market. It has 125,000 customers for its premium website management services, and it hosts over 1.5 million websites, with some 88 percent classified as being for “advanced web and IT services”.

I’m waiting for the riots to start.

BlackBerry breaks silence in open letter

The ad also boasts about apps that will allow Android and iPhone owners to use BlackBerry Messenger instant messaging, noting that the six million people who have signed up for notices about those apps “speaks to the tremendous opportunity we have to expand BBM beyond BlackBerry smartphones to make it the world’s largest mobile social network.” Absent, however, is any reference to how the release of the apps was abruptly stopped last month because of technical problems.

Is this enough? BlackBerry touts 6 million iOS and Android users are eager to install the BBM app. So where in the world is it guys? You need to deliver ASAP.

2013/10/15
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Technology

The Fall Of BlackBerry

Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail published an article yesterday entitled “How BlackBerry blew it: The Inside Story“.

This is quite an extensive inside look at the demise of this former tech giant. 9 pages in total. It tells a story of how divided focus among executives is extremely hurtful to a company. The best summary of the struggle of power I found was by a commenter koolrosh at CrackBerry.

The way I see it, they all had good strategies, but because they were so divided, they didn’t do anything right. It took them forever to execute on one thing, but did not follow a clear cut strategy.

Lasaridis=> Wanted to focus on Enterprise. Understood that they needed a better OS, but wanted to build a keyboard device only. Wanted to launch BB10 first with keyboard device.

Balsillie=> Saw the smartphone market as commoditised, so wanted to focus on services and cross-platform BBM. He also wanted Blackberry to start offering other services through Carriers, like cloud storage.

Thorsten=> Saw BB10 as the only way to save Blackberry and put all his focus on the launch. Cancelled all other projects and focused on delivering BB10. Wanted to launch with a touch screen first because he thought keyboard phones were dead and there was money to be made selling a superior touchscreen OS.

I think if any one of them was able to execute on their strategy from the beginning, BlackBerry would be in a better situation.

After reading this article, I was actually surprised. I was in shock of how wrong most people are about Jim Balsillie. Everyone, their mothers and even CrackBerry it self seemed to always make Balsillie look to be the rotten egg in the management team. However, I personally feel that he had right ideas. It turns out he had a better vision of the future of BlackBerry than the others.

I think that SMS 2.0 might have been a real game changer for them. Oh wait, Thorsten Heins is just realizing the significance of this now and failed again. One can actually see the huge difference in execution here. Balsillie wanted to make BBM into a service seamless and on the back-end via the carriers making it an industry standard, hence SMS 2.0. Heins on the other hand wanted to distribute it as an app for free many years too late. It’s all in the execution.

Also, I found Apple’s exclusive deal with AT&T in the early days noteworthy. This is because it made Verizon worry and they quickly approached BlackBerry to create an “iPhone killer” in retaliation. The result was a rushed and half-baked BlackBerry Storm which failed in many ways including its awkward SureType touch screen. This poor product launch forced Verizon to see out another company to build the ‘iPhone killer”, Google. In essence, BlackBerry’s failure led to a brand new competition in the Android operating system. Which went on to dominate the low-end market, hurting BlackBerry, Nokia, Palm and Microsoft.

If one thing is for certain, it’s that BlackBerry will be forever remembered in case studies at business schools all over the world in the future.

2013/09/29
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Technology

September 26, 2013

BlackBerry to go private?

Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. a Canadian insurance firm, signed a letter of intent with the BlackBerry board under which it could pay $9 a share in cash for the 90% of BlackBerry shares it doesn’t already own. The hastily arranged deal came over the weekend, according to people familiar with the effort, after BlackBerry announced on Friday it had nearly $1 billion in unsold phones and would slash 40% of its workforce. The stock plunged 17% that day to below $9.

The man leading this buy out is Prem Watsa. He owns around 10% of BlackBerry already and is now looking to take it all. In one way I am glad that someone sees value in this Canadian company. On the other hand, I think that Watsa low-balled them a bit only offering 9 bucks a share. BlackBerry has about 6 weeks to sign the deal. Will someone else step up to the plate? I am hoping that company co-founder Mike Lazaridis makes a bid. BlackBerry could have their “Steve Jobs” moment with the founder making a come back.

Valve announce SteamOS

Valve founder Gabe Newell has previously attacked the Windows 8 operating system, calling it “a catastrophe”. Microsoft’s latest OS provides its own digital gaming service, designed along similar lines to the Apple app store – but Newell suggested this potential monopoly would hit margins for developers and PC manufacturers and drive many from the market. In contrast, the SteamOS is more similar to Google’s Android proposition: a blueprint that can be adapted by hardware manufacturers and end users. From the announcement:

“With SteamOS, ‘openness’ means that the hardware industry can iterate in the living room at a much faster pace than they’ve been able to. Content creators can connect directly to their customers. Users can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want. Gamers are empowered to join in the creation of the games they love.”

I like that the gaming industry is pushing back against Microsoft’s vice-grip on them. Is SteamPhone and SteamPad around the corner?

Microsoft reveal Surface RT 2 and Surface Pro 2

However, there’s another, vastly important aspect of the Surface success equation: the software. Some of the most critical problems with the original slates were core aspects of Windows 8. The operating system is far and away the most finger-friendly Windows yet, but the need to frequently drop into desktop mode on the Pro raised a host of troublesome scaling issues. Those issues were less of a problem on the RT, but only thanks to the incompatibility with legacy apps.

Seriously? So much for learning lessons from recent past mistakes. Stop crippling your software on the lower-end models. There is no excuse for that.

2013/09/26
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