Welcome Guest   |  Login   |   Signup
JG Logo
Thu, May 24, 2012
Archive Search

Heins Travels by Day, Works at Night Using BlackBerry in First Week in Office
January 29, 2012

Share This Page
0
0
0
0
Share with google+ :


Post a comment
Please login to post comment

Comments

Be the first to write your opinion!

Thorsten Heins, five days into his job as RIM’s CEO, pledged to regain lost ground in the US smartphone market and said he held talks with rivals eager to license its software.

RIM will begin a campaign with US carriers this week to entice consumers to try its latest BlackBerry 7 devices with touch screens and better Web browsers, Heins said in an interview at Bloomberg headquarters in New York on Friday. The promotions won’t be about “just simply money,” they will also involve mobile applications, or apps, he said.

“We have to do something dramatically different in the US to get our market share back,” said Heins, 54. “I’m here to fight. I’m here to win.”

The Munich native is getting by on a handful of hours sleep a night so that he can travel by day to meet customers and run the business by night on his BlackBerry. The company needs to improve its marketing and communicate better to build excitement about its products, he said.

“In the first 100 days, that is what you’re going to see me focus on,” Heins said. “My first job is to get BlackBerry 7 into all of your hands.”

US sales fell 45 percent last quarter, dragging revenue lower even as sales in emerging markets like Indonesia and India surged.

“When BlackBerry got positioned the way you experienced it, it was on a set of values: battery life, network efficiency, security and best typing experience,” Heins said. “In the US specifically, what we missed is a shift in those paradigms” to more consumer-oriented features like Web-browsing and apps, he said.

Now, RIM is rebuilding its lineup of BlackBerrys on BB10, an operating system based on software used to run nuclear power plants and unmanned aerial drones. In the interview, Heins repeatedly went back to a video demonstration of PlayBook 2.0, its new tablet software which incorporates many of the features that will come with BB10. He showed how users can flip between e-mail, Web browsing, Facebook and Twitter without ever leaving any of those programs.

RIM’s new software is appealing enough that he’s been approached about licensing it, Heins said. The company has held discussions with interested handset makers and personal-computer makers, he said, declining to name them.

The suggestion that he will be unduly influenced by co-founder Mike Lazaridis, who is staying on as vice chairman and leads RIM’s innovation committee, is incorrect, Heins said.

“I love to work with Mike in his visionary capacities,” he said. ’’But make no mistake, I run the company." 

Bloomberg