"It's clearly differentiated." Then he pointed to a touchscreen phone. Lazaridis pointed to a BlackBerry with a keyboard. Lazaridis that the market for keyboard-equipped mobile phones – RIM's signature offering – was dead. Heins's newest executive recruits, chief marketing officer Frank Boulben and chief operating officer Kristian Tear. Minutes earlier, he said, he had spoken with Mr. The speaker was none other than Michael Lazaridis, the genius behind the BlackBerry, the company's co-founder and its former co-CEO. There is a cultural problem at RIM, he told the group, and the Z10 was a glaring manifestation of it.
the dominant names in the global smartphone market.īut one of RIM's directors was frustrated by what he saw, and spoke out, according to one person who was in the room. His weapon was the BlackBerry Z10, a slim device with the kind of glass touchscreen that had made Apple Inc. chief executive officer Thorsten Heins sat down with the board of directors at the company's Waterloo, Ont., headquarters to review plans for the launch of a new phone designed to turn around the company's fortunes. Heins and his executives did not take the advice and launched the touchscreen Z10, with disastrous results
Lazaridis opposed the launch plan for the BlackBerry 10 phones and argued strongly in favour of emphasizing keyboard devices.
In 2012, one-time co-CEO Jim Balsillie quit the board and cut all ties to BlackBerry in protest after his plan to shift focus to instant-messaging software, which had been opposed by founder Mike Lazaridis, was killed by current CEO Thorsten Heins.Shortly after the release of the first iPhone, Verizon asked BlackBerry to create a touchscreen “iPhone killer.” But the result was a flop, so Verizon turned to Motorola and Google instead.
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