From DailyTech: With its smartphone market share decimated, critiqueing BlackBerry, Ltd. (TSE:BB) becomes a somewhat unpleasant business given that one feels that anything critical said is somewhat of an exercise in "beating a dead horse" as the old idiom goes. That said, assuming that BlackBerry is holding out some faint hope of restoring a small part of its former market share, at least, one element of its leaked strategy is downright perplexing.
Here's the scenario. You're CEO of BlackBerry. It's June 2014. Your market share is shambles. So you announce an "unconventional" device. Most phones are rectangular. So why not make a square one, you think? The BlackBerry Passport, the first square flagship smartphone is born.
It takes you months to roll out the device. And when you do, it packs a somewhat mixed hardware spec for a high-end device. But customers and the media find its square form factor confounding. You can't even convince your wife to use one. Oh and the phone is priced much higher than rival models with similar value.
The result -- the device flops posting a low sales volume (a March Morgan Stanley (MS) report claimed less than 8K units has sold thusfar in Q1). So what do you do?
Most would answer something like "fire sale", which is more or less what BlackBerry CEO John S. Chen did do. That's not surprising, given that he's been known to show more pragmatism than the former BlackBerry leadership that plunged the company into the mire.
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