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RIM responds to purported open letter from 'high level' employee

RIM responds to purported open letter from 'high level' employee

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Earlier today BGR published a letter purportedly from a "high-level RIM employee" written to co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. The anonymous letter went through a litany of problems plaguing the company, from software missteps to managerial issues to a fundamental failure to put the consumer experience ahead of engineering concerns. In all, the points sounded quite a bit like our own concerns over a strategy that feels like it's a year too late. BGR says that they've verified the identity of the author, though it's hard to know just how "high-level" he or she is.

Crazily, RIM has responded on its official blog, and just as crazily, it also has no named author. As you might expect, RIM backs its strategy and looks for patience during its "major business and technology transition." RIM doesn't say whether it believed the letter was real -- but does insinuate that it might have been "written with ulterior motivations." RIM's own motivations for posting the response are equally murky, but it's clear that the company is feeling plenty of heat from several directions. A lousy quarter and a lousier outlook, calls for reorganizing top management, recent Nielsen marketshare numbers that show BlackBerry dropping from 11 perent of US smartphone sales to 6 percent in the last quarter, and a stock price headed in the wrong direction all add up to a big wave of bad news, but where and when it will crash is yet to be seen. At the very least, it's nice to see that RIM isn't completely deaf to all the nay-saying.