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BLACKBERRY MAKERS RESEARCH in Motion’s co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, announced yesterday they are stepping down from the once-iconic company that has struggled to compete in recent years.
The pair who founded RIM will be replaced by Thorsten Heins, a chief operating officer who joined RIM four years ago from Siemens AG, RIM said.
Balsillie and Lazaridis have headed Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM together for the past two decades.
“There comes a time in the growth of every successful company when the founders recognize the need to pass the baton to new leadership. Jim and I went to the board and told them that we thought that time was now,” Lazaridis said in a statement.
The Canadian company has suffered a series of setbacks and has lost tens of billions in market value. A company that was worth more than $70 billion a few years ago now has a market value of $8.9 billion.
RIM said last month that new phones deemed critical to the company’s future will be delayed until late 2012.
And its PlayBook tablet, RIM’s answer to the Apple iPad, failed to gain consumer support, forcing the company to give it deep discounts to move the devices off store shelves.
A widespread outage also frustrated tens of millions of BlackBerry users in October.
Lazaridis will take on a new role as vice chairman of RIM’s board and chairman of the board’s new innovation committee. Balsillie remains a member of the board.
“I agree this is the right time to pass the baton to new leadership, and I have complete confidence in Thorsten, the management team and the company,” Balsillie said in the statement. “I remain a significant shareholder and a director and, of course, they will have my full support.”
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Meanwhile
An unknown shelf company buys a company in a tax haven somewhere to minimise paying tax in their own country.
Yes, and said company’s latest project is to launch an A to Z Guide on how to ship $10 bn annual profits tax free out of various western jurisdictions in a captainless boat to a Caribbean Island tax haven.
Along with the rest of the multinationals.
Only way for Apple is down, unless they start innovating, which is unlikely to happen since the end of the Steve Jobs era.
Maybe so
Plenty of shilling in the bank to whittle away in the meantime.
http://www.businessinsider.com/global-cash-reserves-companies-nations-2014-4?IR=T
Moderate Michael, Apple has been written off so many times and has always bounced back. It would be unwise to write them off based on stock market valuations. So it’s only the second most valuable company in the world ? And this means they’re on the way down? I would have thought that it was an indicator of success.
Michael, living in the cloud, no pun intended, if you think Apple is going down or even if it cares about Google.
Google makes basically no product, Apple is a product based company. If it only makes 99% of a gazillion instead of the full gazillion the 20 year old stockmarket jockeys write it off again.
In reality they force the price down, buy in at the new lower price then sell again a month later ehen the shares have recovered. Oldest trick in the business
Alphabet “… made a profit of $4.9 billion (€4.48 billion) in the last quarter of 2015, and saw its value rise to $568 billion (€520 billion) in after-hours trading, beating Apple’s value of $535 billion (€490 billion).”
Apple made a profit of $11.1 billion in the last quarter of 2015 and has more cash in the bank than the GDP of many European nations, over $200 billion. I wouldn’t worry too much about stock market valuations because they are so fickle. Anyone who writes Apple of is stupid. Largest or second largest company in the world? Is it really important?
Whoever clicks on those adds?
As someone who works in the industry (and it is an entire industry), I can’t tell you that a LOT of people click on those ads. In search, between 30-50 percent click on them depending on the search term (older, less tech savvy people are more likely).
Increasingly, more and more clicks are being driven from the display network as Google provides better ways to filter out the crap.
Those remarketing ads that “follow” you around, it would shock you how well they work. When they were first released, I refused to use them, believing everyone was like me, creeped out and would simply install an ad blocker. I was wrong. Very wrong.
Now, advertisers even have access to show you those remarketing ads based on your email address. This is still in beta but it works even better than regular remarketing lists. If I have your email address and it’s a Google email address, I can tell Google to show you my ads on the display network. Even if you’ve never had any interaction with me.
Google/Alphabet is going to become even more valuable this year. It’s advertising and analytics products are incredible. Whether you agree with advertising or not, they’re going from strength to strength. It would scare the crap out of you how much data about you that advertisers have. In Ireland, it’s pretty easy to build up a database of the entire population. Statistically, you’re likely to be in one of mine.
The rise in use of ad blockers (which on most of them, Google ads are whitelisted by default) is more than offset by the rise in new people using the Internet.
Google also have an entire team dedicated to making sure ads are not intrusive. I wouldn’t be shorting their stock any time soon.
Knock it if you will, just remember Googles stock is part of millions of people’s pension funds.
This is the best clickbait headline I have read this year.
i just had to click to click. Fair play.
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