John Chen has been media friendly since he has been in office for BlackBerry, both via interviews and blog posts, he sat down with the Globe and Mail in an extensive interview discussing his simple plan to save BlackBerry, a great read.
He says BlackBerry has had a problem of over-promising and under-delivering with a great lack of accountability, possible reasoning for several employees “leaving”?
The move to change the service-fee formula bewilders Chen—he likens it to someone quitting his job hoping a better one will come along, then wondering why he can’t afford rent. “I would never have done that,” he says. “The disruption of the service-access fees was a mistake.”
Another big issue was a deep schism within the company over whether BlackBerry should focus on consumers or its core enterprise customers. “There are a lot of opinions in the company and they’re not necessarily lined up,” says Chen. “I can’t really say if the focus on the consumer is the right thing versus enterprise, or vice versa. But I know we need to pick somewhere to start.”
For Chen, the answer is obvious: The company has an installed base of more than 80,000 enterprise customers that not only provide BlackBerry phones to their employees, but manage those devices via BlackBerry servers installed on their premises, which relay messages over BlackBerry’s secure network.
Read full interview via the Globe and Mail.