SEVEN

Today we hear the news that the co-chief executives of Research in Motion – the makers of BlackBerry – have stepped down from the top jobs as they failed to reverse the company’s decline.

Ever since the fateful service outage in October, and the part BBM played in organising the riots shortly in August, it was surely only a matter of time until something had to change over at BlackBerry HQ.

Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie brought BlackBerry to the market where it enjoyed ‘must-have’ status for almost a decade – but now with so many other Smartphones available, the original RIM offering just doesn’t seem to cut it any more.

Despite immense popularity amongst young people (who couldn’t live without the instant messaging service, BBM, when they’re out of credit), business folk who the BlackBerry was originally intended for, have lost interest shown by the $70bn reported losses since the BB peak in 2008!

It’s just that iPhones are so much better! Or are they? I think so… But maybe I’m just so bowled over by their amazing marketing campaigns.

With new CEO Thorsten Heins already on the hunt for a new Marketing Chief at RIM, maybe a clever campaign would go a long way to winning customers back to BlackBerry?

Watch this space…