One corporate video and one short press call is all we have available to judge new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins’ intentions. He made it clear in both that he is completely behind the development of the new BlackBerry 10 platform, and its supporting QNX OS, as the future of Blackberry and RIM. He is wedded to the idea of RIM as an integrated device – service – network company, and took care to reject the perception that RIM was a hardware only business.
Principally, he has called for better “execution” on product delivery – to time and to cost. Mainly, he would like to make sure the company stops tinkering with its development of products “in-running”, and focus on just defining and then delivering the product. He would also like to improve the way Blackberry communicates with its consumer segment (he described the enterprise segment as a “fortress” owned by RIM). He’s recruiting now for a CMO to change RIM’s marcomms policy, and to take advantage of its presence with its 75 million users and millions of BBM customers.
It’s not all about external comms, however. In a clear nod to the sort of internal discord that saw a host of open letters posted from disgruntled employees, he said he wanted employees to feel a part of the decision making process, and to be able to make suggestions and take their own risks.
There was no mention at all of RIM’s channel, principally its operator partners, who will be crucial to the development of the company’s device range over the next year or so. He called Apple, “the other fruit company”, which passes for high humour amongst CEOs of companies that turn over $20 billion.
So here are the quotes from today: Heins on RIM, and Heins on Heins. If you wanted to summarise, it could perhaps be, “just do it…better”.
On RIM’s culture:
Yes we have to get better at execution but we’ve learned a lot. We must never lose the innovation spirit but once we say a product is defined we have to move more decisively into execution mode. Sometimes we innovate too much while we are building a product.
On the enterprise market:
Enterprise is a very strong fortress that we own. We want to keep owning this.
On employee culture:
Employees need to see they participate, have input that is understood and is made into product or services, and that they contribute not just by doing, but by discussing, being innovative and giving us ideas that we need to transfer into our product.
On new platforms:
BlackBerry 10: We must make this the “blow the socks off experience” for all our customers. We are rebuilding a whole new platform for RIM for the next decade. This is unheard of that any company has done this within 18 months.
On RIM strategy:
We are an integrated solution company. We not just a service company, we run a network, we run services and devices and this is a very unique position in the wireless landscape. 75 million people are using our Blackberry services every day, and 65 million customer are using BBM. When you transform from 294 million to just under 20 billion in revenues,you hit a few bumps in the road here and there. We are stronger today because of what we have been going through.
Mike and Jim purchased QNX to set up the transformation of the Blackberry platform in the next decade. We see that this was the right path to go. QNX is a proven OS and the beauty is it is a multi-kernel, milti-threaded OS that allows true multi-tasking, you can have many apps open at the same time and really run them in real time in parallel. With BlackBerry 10, we can really go vertical, we can select based on BB10 and QNX into what vertical industries we want to go. Playbook is not a tablet only, it is the first iteration of a mobile computing platform.
We will also bring in new talent as required, we are in process of recruiting a new CMO to work with the products and sales teams to deliver the most compelling products and services. We need to be more consumer orientated, because that’s where a lot of the growth coming from. We need to engage more with the consumer base – with all these 75 million customers out there and take them with us on exploring Blackberry for the future.
I know what it means to be in a device only business. It is a cut-throat business. We are strong because we have an integrated solution: network, services, enterprise servers fantastic devices and an ecosystem that we are building. I will not in any way split this up into separate businesses. My chief focus is to strengthen RIM’s business based on that integrated approach – there are not many companies that have this. One is the other fruit company and the other is us, and I want to leverage this.
We are still a growing company, although there are a few challenges out there. We will bring Paybook 2.0 on time to market, then we will talk about BlackBerry 10, a fantastic new platform and product and that will lead us to a new future. For the time being we need to get on with it.
On himself:
I’m an outdoors kind of a guy who loves tech.
I’m really good at inspiring teams, nurturing them, but am also very performance driven. When we decide on getting something done, I want it done on time to quality and cost.