Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

Plenty of People Offer Their Numbers to RIM’s New CEO

Thorsten Heins has only been CEO of Research In Motion for a day, but there is no shortage of people waiting to give the executive their advice for the troubled phone maker.

There’s eWeek’s list of 10 things Heins should do, and a separate Top 10 to-do items from CNET. Mashable’s list had only four items, and Fierce Wireless boiled it down to three. TechCrunch, meanwhile, offered up a list of things that Heins should not do, which was basically the opposite of many of the recommendations on the other to-do lists.

Personally, I have too many things on my own to-do list to have time to make one for Heins.

But I would just offer up a few facts to a man who believes, or at least publicly states, that no radical change is needed at RIM.

The BlackBerry maker has lost three points of market share in just the past three months.

As recently as 2009, RIM accounted for 54 percent of smartphone shipments in North America. By mid-2011, analysts said its share of this market had dropped to just 13 percent.

Oh, yeah — and the stock. As a longtime RIM executive, I doubt Heins needs reminding of the share price. But just to be sure, I took a screenshot of the chart shown on RIM’s investor Web site. It shows a stock that was above $60 a year ago, and is now barely above $15 a share.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald