After some intense pressure, finally it seems, Lazaridis, Balsillie to resign. Not sure what change we would see with the direction of the company. I hope this would do something good to the company. Detail news can be found here:
RIM's Lazaridis, Balsillie resign - Business - CBC News

RIM's press release has more details
Research In Motion Names Thorsten Heins President and CEO

Partial quote:

This is good news.

Video of new CEO Thorsten Heins
Meet Thorsten Heins, RIM President and CEO «Inside BlackBerry - The Official BlackBerry Blog

Actuallly 7 videos.

Not soon enough.
The Dynamic Duo are still on the Board (a negative).
The new CEO is an engineer, not a CEO, and will not satisfy US analysts.
Clean-up did not go far enough, and did not change the company enough.
Sorry, I really like my 9900 and bought it over an Iphone or a 'droid, but if the company is to survive they need to hire a top notch outside leader & deep six the nepotistic dead weight.

I still believe my rumour of Jim being removed from the co-CEO role was correct. It's just instead of only him, Mike has been asked to get lost too!

Anyways.. Stock is already up in the pre-market... obviously incredibly low volume, and it's only 57 cents (just earlier it was 71 cents ahead) so we'll see what goes on there.

Let's hope this means sticking to target dates, working to entice developers to the platform, and being truly competitive in the consumer market.

But Mike is plopping another $50 Million to up his stake in the company.... so obviously he cares about its regrowth and future success.

The market is open, and it's now below Friday's close and currently falling. While a new CEO might be the fix that RIM needs right now, to have the new CEO say that nothing really needs to change at RIM suggest that, well... nothing needs to change. Right out of the gate this seems like a wasted opportunity.

I found the 8 minute "meet our new CEO" video was a little unflattering, but we'll have to see what happens in the next few months.

Obviously the most important to show that they're capable is to get OS 2.0 out early in Feb. From what I've seen it looks fairly complete now.

True. Talk is just talk, no matter what the new CEO says. Action, however... well, let's just see what happens over the next few months and beyond.

Stock down 7% . . .

Stock might be down, but for some reason, this news has spurned me on to check whether there is an OS upgrade for my BB. I haven't done that for MONTHS!

Eh, Apple had a change in leadership last year and I have not seen much in the way of change.

The main difference is Apple was hitting record numbers and was, for a moment, the most valuable company in America, beating out Exxon. There isn't much need for change in that case. In RIM's case, there is a drastic need for change.

Actually, they were the most valuable company on the planet.

Apple: Breathing company, dying CEO.
RIM: Breathing CEO(s), dying company.

Nice analogy

If RIM continues to over promise and under deliver, no change would do any good. That is what needs to change.

Yes but that was because Steve Jobs was dying and Apple was still a strong company. In this case RIM is falling apart. Apple's figures were released yesterday, they sold more iPhone's in a year than RIM did, same goes for the iPAD.

With the leadership changing at RIM there could be only a couple of things, RIM is sold, or there is an overhaul of the entire company thus what's left of the Playbook will most likely be scrapped.

Keep in mind RIM is losing billions each year at their current state while Apple makes billions more.

A.

Quote:
Originally Posted by TBOLTRAM
Eh, Apple had a change in leadership last year and I have not seen much in the way of change.

While you may not have caught the intended irony of my comment I do offer you the following items that Apple will have to deal with since the change in leadership:

1. Foxcom is becoming more of a liability to Apple and the other companies that use it due to the labor issues. Something is going to have change or else there may be a major bump in the supply chain.

2. Steve Jobs had a "kill Android even if it kills Apple" mentality. I wonder if this will continue or if some sort of compromise will be reached. You don't attack companies that supply quite a bit of the material you use in your own products without concern of a a major bump in the supply chain. Note that some of this is being played out in the courts of Europe and Apple has not been winning cases recently.

My comment referred to no change in how Apple is dealing with the two issues above.

Foxconn has labour issues that will most likely always remain in some way or another. You think 300 employees threatening to jump is a problem? They have 900,000 employees. Apple did also state they are going to be more aggressive on pressing companies within their supply chain to adhere to basic labour requirements.

As far as the future success, the one thing that's being toyed around is that RIM should license the BB10 OS to other companies like Samsung and HTC who only make Android phones. There's a big enough market to have 3 or 4 OS companies, and then 5-6 handset companies.

RIM can then focus on maybe 2 or 3 handsets they make (maybe just 2?) and put the rest of it on their core software services (OS, "built in house" apps and 'cloud' computing)

We'll see, there's a lot in the next 4-6 months I'm expecting.