While it is not very surprising, it is still sad to see. Blackberry has announced that they will be halting all internal hardware development and will focus only on software development going forward. The news came from the company’s 2nd Quarter financials report call, where the company announced revenue of just $334 million for the quarter. That is down nearly 50% from last year and is a far cry from the billion-plus quarters of just a handful of years ago. How the mighty have fallen.
To their credit and the credit of CEO John Chen, there is light at the end of the tunnel. The company is shifting to a software company and the returns on that shift and investment are already starting to happen. The new Blackberry will be building apps and services around security and productivity for Android devices, two areas that Blackberry has always excelled at doing.
While the announcement means Blackberry themselves won’t be making any new hardware, that doesn’t mean we won’t see new Blackberry hardware. The company has teamed up with partners
Blackberry Priv
Foxconn and TCL for the design and building the phones (under the DTEK name) going forward. All this really means is that we just won’t see any company build hardware any longer.
For a long time writer in the mobile space, the news is sad for me personally. There was a time that the company dominated the mobile world. That all changed in 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone and Android devices a short time later. The company was painfully slow to respond and simply relied for too long on the “we’ve always done it this way” mantra. It nearly killed the company.
You can read all the quarterly earnings news here and be sure to check out the Blackberry apps in the Play Store. They are pretty darn impressive.
