RIM Manufacturing Partner Pulls the Plug On BlackBerry Phones 100
zacharye writes "Toronto-based original device manufacturer Celestica on Monday announced that it will stop producing hardware for struggling mobile device vendor Research In Motion. Celestica stated that it will wind down manufacturing services related to BlackBerry devices over the next three to six months, and it expects restructuring charges to be less than $35 million."
So Sad (Score:3, Insightful)
The rise and downfall of RIM parallel's slashdot, myspace and others in many ways.
The early leaders that never adapted and eventually get surpassed by better, smarter competitors. The desperate and late attempts to remain relevant only to just slowly fade into obscurity.
Really sad.
Re:So Sad (Score:5, Funny)
The rise and downfall of RIM parallel's slashdot, myspace and others in many ways.
You're still here... :-)
Re:So Sad (Score:5, Funny)
The rise and downfall of RIM parallel's slashdot, myspace and others in many ways.
You're still here... :-)
His point *exactly*.
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where are the cool people hanging out these days for "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters"?
I get most of my 'geek news' from my twitter feed these days. I follow many tech writers / aggregators, and I just click on the links for stories that interest me.
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" ... I don't know is proof that slashdot has fallen ... "
Slashdot has not yet fallen
Slashdot is falling
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I'm curious about the fall of Slashdot. Why do you think it has fallen?
Because of sites like Digg and Reddit? Trust me those sites are fads as can already been seen with Digg falling very far. True democratic moderation suck balls because the general public is made up of idiots. Slashdot's system of limited public trusted moderation is better (not perfect but better than letting any monkey with a keyboard press buttons). Eventually people realize how stupid systems like Digg and Reddit are and they le
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CmdrTaco jumping ship, Idle, SlashBI, Slashdot TV, the more obvious Slashvertisement stories a.k.a 'sponsored stories', etc.
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And slashdot??? Huh? When slashdot was new, almost everyone on the internet was a nerd. Now we're vastly outnumbered by normals. Five years ago, let alone ten, you seldom saw a /. thread with 500 comments, now it's common.
Besides, no innovation? Actually I could have done without a lot of slashdot's innovations.
Can you point me to a better site for discussing nerdy topics?
RIM Executives... (Score:5, Funny)
"Hey, at least we're not Nokia!" :)
So what does this mean? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So what does this mean? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So what does this mean? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they're not.
And - BGR has taken paticular interest in finding news about rim and turning into a negative thing. What manufacturer would intentionally stop building devices at contract volumes and rates? My bet is RIM pulled their business for some reason. In order words, this is a non-story that BGR is turning into a negative story about RIM.
Ever since RIM gave all the other sites BB10 dev alpha devices and didn't give one to BGR, they've been running constant negative coverage.
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I tend to agree with you, even if you are an A.C. Otherwise, I would think that the WWJ would be breaking this story instead.
Re:So what does this mean? (Score:5, Insightful)
They pulled their business because NO ONE IS BUYING THE DEVICES.
Whats difficult to understand here? No one buys these devices anymore, so they'll reducing the amount of manufacturing potential they have rather than keeping a production line ready and costing them to sit idle. This is just another part of the death spiral to everyone with their eyes open.
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they are SITTING ON ONE BILLION WORTH OF UNSOLD INVENTORY you blithering idiot.They arent trimming the fat. the only thing they have is fat. they are shedding their limbs which are fat with unsold garbage.
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They pulled their business because NO ONE IS BUYING THE DEVICES.
Whats difficult to understand here? No one buys these devices anymore, so they'll reducing the amount of manufacturing potential they have rather than keeping a production line ready and costing them to sit idle. This is just another part of the death spiral to everyone with their eyes open.
That doesn't add up. CA manufactures for RIM - they don't manufacture for consumers.
When RIM is placing orders, CA fills them. RIM has stopped placing orders with CA, meaning that they're not going to produce more phone for RIM.
My guess is that RIM is winding down production of legacy devices ahead of BB 10; and that CA would not/could not offer a competitive price for the new devices.
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What manufacturer would intentionally stop building devices at contract volumes and rates?
A manufacturer that has determined that the volume of manufacturing being requested no longer justifies the base cost of tying up resources in light of opportunities to contract with other clients whose outlook isn't as bleak as RIM's currently is. Also, if they aren't one of the companies that RIM is contracting to produce their last gasp BB10 handsets or they lack confidence in BB10, they are MUCH better off repositioning themselves to work with other companies now rather than riding RIMs decline even fa
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And - BGR has taken paticular interest in finding news about rim and turning into a negative thing.
OK, so how would you spin that as a positive? Yes, recent news stories about RIM and Nokia are consistently negative. Maybe that's because there's not a lot of positive to report about either company at this time.
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Usually, that manufacturer assembles the limited runs of devices they give out to Western governments and the military. The parts still come from China, but the device itself is assembled in Canada for security reasons (not that this guarantees anything of course).
The rest of their devices however, get both manufactured and assembled in China. Only in China and/or Asia can they produce the kind of volumes required, not to mention they don't have to pay the normal Canadian Union wages over there.
RIM shut them down (Score:3)
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maybe go bust. We'll see.
You don't consider where RIM is has already achieved bust? Do you need them to roll up the carpet before you call it bust?
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didn't RIM get a huge cash infusion (or several) from all those corrupt governments that bought them off and allowed them to snoop on all data going thru their systems?
I've never owned a BB but this huge negative PR event caused me to never care about this company, ever again. I doubt enough people thought this way but I definitely did.
Re:RIM shut them down (Score:4, Interesting)
I've never owned a BB but this huge negative PR event caused me to never care about this company, ever again.
So you already didn't care about any of the other mobile phone manufacturers because their devices were already being snooped on because their devices didn't have encryption in the first place? It wasn't like RIM [slashdot.org] didn't fight [hexus.net] against it. It's their security that has been their bread and butter since the beginning. If data is going through a BIS/BES not even RIM has the keys to decrypt the traffic.
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Actually there was. BES can't be decrypted by RIM because the customer owns the keypairs used to encrypt the data . They've never wavered on that.
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Unless the government(s) ask for it, then it's free for the taking.
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Or maybe, because the demand for the models created at this manufacturer is declining so much, that RIM doesn't need the excess manufacturing capacity. There are 4 factories producing phones for RIM. This equates to a 25% cut in manufacturing (actually less, since the other factories can pick up some if not all of the lost capacity).
Ford and GM close plants all the time and nobody shouts the sky is falling. The sky may very well be falling for RIM, but closing a plant and moving production elsewhere are
RIM's got a 100-year supply anyway (Score:5, Funny)
so this doesn't mean much.
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I bet they won't even sell all 100 devices in that time.
If RIM were a passenger jet... (Score:5, Funny)
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The stick would be shaking and an artificial voice would be warning: "pull up, pull up".
That's giving them a lot of credit, the current outlook seems more like "we're out of gas and the ground is coming up pretty fast"...
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Re:If RIM were a passenger jet... (Score:4, Insightful)
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We dont want them to. We want them to suffer from their hubris and stupidity. Blackberry SUCKS. In the face of competition they thumbed their nose at their customer, instead of rising to meet the challenge. RIM deserves to die because they thought they could ride secure email until the end of the mobile revolution.
That depends on your point of view. My employer is now contemplating the option of either banning personal phones for all employees and mandating Blackberry phones or forcing them to install some security suite on their personal phones that gives our MCSEs "complete control over all devices with company data" including the ability to brick then remotely. So if you are fond of a North Korea like IT infrastructure where all employees use phones and laptops that are under complete company control via some Acti
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That is certainly how we run our place, and quite right too.
If your working, your using a company device. If it has company data on it then we control it. Anything that connects to our network has to be under our control. Frankly if you want your own phone then carry one, but your carrying a work phone as well, and your phone is only for personal stuff and your work phone for work stuff and never the twain shall meet.
Having worked in support for a long time this seems perfectly reasonable to me. You don't
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The LAST thing to do in that situation is pull up.
He may be confusing TCAS warnings although I think TCAS would say "TRAFFIC CLIMB CLIMB CLIMB"
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I think he's thinking GPWS - in which case it would tell you to pull up, however the stick would not be shaking.
Bottom line is that there are a bunch of flight situations where the computer will desperately try to save its own life and the post mixed together two of them.
Or, maybe he was in a stall at low altitude, in which case you ignore both the warnings and the stick and hit the ejection lever, or if you don't have one it would be a good time to pray.
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...the post mixed together two of them.
Yes, it was for comedic effect. Regardless, the RIM execs responding to the warnings would probably be someone like these guys [cnet.com].
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I believe that some aircraft have a mechanism that intentionally vibrates the stick as a means to alert the pilot to such a warning.
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http://www.hark.com/clips/czrvlssbvs-terrain-terrain-pull-up [hark.com]
Re:If RIM were an F14... (Score:2)
When you enter an unrecoverable flat spin to your impending doom, the answer is to eject (ideally with a golden parachute.)
Didn't save Goose tho.
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Obviously... (Score:5, Funny)
It is rumored that Apple and Google also have products in this space but they are irrelevant.
Re:Obviously... (Score:5, Informative)
Truth be told, it was MS who killed RIM. ActiveSync, the mobile syncing software used in Exchange and several other commercial mail servers, made BES unnecessary for a lot of companies. I know at my company only devices with ActiveSync support are used. We shut down our BES over a year ago and were glad to see it go.
RIM should have had ActiveSync on BB devices as soon as it started to be popular, instead they kept wanting that BES licensing money and it led to their own demise.
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If you're going to have a forkbomb in your sig, make it more obvious that the code is supposed to be ran.
The '$' at the left is not enough to put the reader's mind in the context of 'bash prompt', since the entire line is a bunch of non-alphanumeric symbols and the dollar sign doesn't stick out.
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Was it? Or was it RIM themselves, which said, well, sure, you've got this fancy, expensive Exchange mail server, but if you want that mail on this RIM phone, you are gonna have to buy some nice expensive software, and some nice expensive hardware, to send that email to our servers, where we will then forward it to your phone.
Meanwhile, everybody else went, we'll got our fancy expensive phone, and it talks directly to your fancy expensive Exchange server, and you don't have to pay extra for it.
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RIM was used to being able to do that, ActiveSync was their first real competition.
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Wasn't the setup like this:
Exchange Server BES server at RIM BlackBerry
And now, for most except for RIM:
Exchange Server phone
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That was pretty much how it worked. Making it worse for them they had some outages on their servers which made all blackberries in the country useless and IT depts left to angry users that they could do nothing about this.
RIM should have made ActiveSync an option on the devices. At least that way when people turned off their BES end users might still buy the devices.
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Clearly the decline of RIM is at the hands of Microsoft, whose Innovative(tm) Windows Phone brings consumers all of the Innovative(tm) features they've been looking for; once they had a taste of Innovative(tm) Windows Phone(tm) there was no further demand for Blackberry.
It is rumored that Apple and Google also have products in this space but they are irrelevant.
The irony in your post is that RIM would have probably been a better platform for Microsoft's Windows Phone than Nokia. Leveraging Windows Phone with RIM's corporate customers would have been something better to compete against Apple and Android which are still really directed at the consumer market. (Yes, people use iPhones and Android phones with their corporate systems all the time, but the vast development effort is on the consumer side.)
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Leveraging Windows Phone with RIM's corporate customers would have been something better to compete against Apple and Android which are still really directed at the consumer market.
The only problem is that Windows Phone is also directed squarely at the consumer market. As far as enterprise integration goes, it was actually worse than iOS until very recently, and it's still worse than Android.
Microsoft will buy them (Score:3)
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No, the First Rider of the Apocalypse is an ex-Microsoft executive moving in as the new CEO. The Second is his retinue of more ex-Microsoft executives, who conquer important operating executive posts. The Third is the announcement of the new Windows Phone strategy.
The Fourth, is reading the obituary on Slashdot.
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I've never bought that argument. I can't see what MS would want them for, considering they've already got mature smartphone and secure email systems. What value does BlackBerry bring? The brand (hoho)?
My money would be on them being bought by a tech giant without an existing smartphone division, and without a big Android investment. Dell, for example. Or Lenovo. HP, if they hadn't already tried and failed with WebOS.
RIM and design analysis software (Score:2, Interesting)
Inaccurate Headline RIM is dropping Celestica (Score:2, Informative)
This headline is designed to give the impression that Celestica is dropping RIM rather then the other way around. This is about RIM moving manufacturing from one plant to another because it makes business sense and has implications with regard to the continued viability of the business model.
When will the American media stop bashing Canadian companies into the ground. RIM is sitting on a billion in cash and has no debt. Yes there sales and marketshare are slipping but you'd think that the company was abou
So RIM has 1 billion in cash? (Score:1)
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They aren't outselling Apple, and don't look as pretty so therefore the company sucks and is doomed.
I'd buy one of these ... if (Score:4, Funny)
... if it were fast enough, had enough RAM (4G) and storage (32G), and had a fully open architecture ... and priced $1 each.
All conquering iPad (Score:2)
Can anything stop the all conquering iPad?"
Like it or not, the iPad is a fad. Most people buy it because it's a visually pleasing piece of hardware. Some state their two year old picked it up and "learned it in two minutes!". News for you people: Any kid who can pick their nose and wipe it on their pants has just learned how to pick an icon and swipe the screen. It's not rocket science. Your kid's not a genius. Apple isn't magic.
These "trends" in hardware and software go away after awhile. Everyone used to piss themselves like an overly-excited p