one billion dollar quarterly loss!

BlackBerry Limited (formerly RIM or Research in Motion) is preparing the public for the news of an one billion dollar quarterly loss as of today. Eighty percent of shipped BlackBerry 10 phones are expected to be returned per a CNN.com quote from a Neeraj Monga! Wow, when I think back on how New Coke tasted in the 80s it suddenly seems like it didn't taste all that bad. There are flops and then there are all-stakes-in-desperation-measures which are flops. Ishtar and Howard the Duck seem like pretty good movies all of a sudden. The Edsel smartphone company is to let go of forty percent of its own (around 4,500 warm bodies) and by "Edsel smartphone company" I mean BlackBerry Limited. What a fallout! You know what sounds tasty right about now?

When Lou Gerstner took over at IBM he was smart enough to see that John Fellows Akers' idea of breaking the company up into a bunch of smaller companies was foolish. The one thing that Big Blue had going for it was the big part. It could still do big things, they would just become different big things. Gerstner transitioned the company from computer sales to consulting to an extreme wherein "International Business Machines" was sort of a misleading name and in doing so he saved a sinking ship. It would have been foolish NOT to course correct upon taking the helm, because the longer he might have held onto the dying business model the less likely he likely would have been (when the denial of the modern reality wore off) to be able to scramble to safe ground. At BlackBerry they have forfeited forty percent of the company in denial.