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Yeesh. The once all-powerful cell phone conglomerate is laying off 4,500 of its employees in an effort to save the fledgling company. The 4,500 now-jobless employees represent roughly 35% of Blackberry’s workforce. So, yeah, you probably had a better week than Blackberry.
Blackberry reported a loss of anywhere between $930 and $960 million dollars in the second business quarter of the year. That’s just brutal. The company originally thought the loss would only be a third of the actual losses.
This might be it for the former king of the cell phone industry, and what an epic fall from grace it has been. It seems like everyone I knew, adults and kids alike, had Blackberrys back in the early to mid-2000s. Then again, it’s pretty easy to own the market share when your main competition is the Motorola Razr, Palm Pilot and Nokia Brick.
The nearly billion dollar loss is attributed to the failure of Blackberry’s newest smartphone, the Z10. Maybe don’t give a cell phone a name that sounds like an economy Chevy truck and you might still be able to employ those 4,500 poor souls who just hit the job market waiver wire.
In the end, Blackberry just couldn’t hack it in the smartphone era, and was never able to compete against the behemoth that is Apple, or Droid. Hell, they could barely compete with the Windows phone. Adapt or die.
That’s just the way it goes in the free market, though. Make a shitty product, you’re gonna dig your own grave. In the past five years, the company’s stock plummeted 90% and has dropped 21% today alone.
[via Mashable]
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Brian McGannon
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