Layoffs at BlackBerry point to a shift to software

OTTAWA, Ontario — In what appears to be part of its retrenchment from making phones, BlackBerry said Friday that it has laid off “a small number of employees” at its head office here and in Florida.

John Chen, the company’s executive chairman and chief executive, is shifting BlackBerry to a company largely based on selling software and services to businesses and governments. He has repeatedly made it clear that the company will continue to produce phones, the product that made BlackBerry a household name, only if that business can at least break even.

BlackBerry did not respond to questions about the number of people affected. On Thursday, it filed a notice with the state of Florida indicating that 75 people at an office in Sunrise will be let go this month. In a statement, the company said that the other layoffs occurred in Waterloo, Ontario.

Read More

It is sad that the Hardware staff at blackberry are being laid off at Blackberry. But, I feel Blackberry spending more times on software like mobile security apps is a good idea because Blackberry is known for its apps like BBM, and secure e-mail software.

Plus, there are too many smartphone makers, and not enough buyers where all phone makers are profitable, and not losing money like HTC and Sony which are not very profitable compared to Apple which makes most of the profits in the smartphone market.

I wonder would Blackberry hire another company to design and test their new smartphone hardware instead of making and testing their own hardware in North America which can sometimes be very expensive because of unions, labor laws, and the average minimum wage for Smartphone Hardware staff in Canada, and the US.

alakazam said:

I don't know why you think that. The hardware of their latest devices (Z10, Z30, Z3 etc.) was pretty good, and their latest operating system, BB 10 was sleek and modern-looking. The only thing they lacked was a populated app store.

Click to expand...

The Blackberry Passport looks like a nice smartphone for users looking for a smartphone with a big screen, and a built-in keyboard with a touchpad built-into the keyboard.

Blackberry 10 is one of the more interesting moblile operating system. It is the only mobile operating system from a well known brand which can run Blackberry 10 Apps, Apps from the Amazon Android App store, Sideload Android APK apps, install apps from the Google Play store once you installed the Google Play APK apps on your phone, and BB10 also runs HTML5 web apps on Blackberry 10.

I read on a tech blog that the Blackberry web browser is one of the fastest web browser for smartphones.