While many consider RIM as a company circling the drain, CEO Thorstein Heinz isn’t about to give up. In an interview with CIO.com, the CEO acknoledged some of the mistakes that RIM made during the emergence of the smartphone. He says that “in 2007, 2008, 2009, the market just opened up, and BlackBerry had kind of created what would later be called the smartphone segment. That meant we had to build a regional portfolio and had to really go after the market. And that led to undeniable success of the company.” That meant that the company didn’t have its focus on the US market, where the CEO admits they weren’t able to focus on the new, innovative technologies in developing in the US at the time.
In regards to BlackBerry 10, Thorstein Heinz was extremely confident and outlines the reason why they decided to push back the release of BB10 from Q4 of 2012 to Januray of 2013. “The delay is because our software groups were actually so successful in coding the various feature components and building blocks that […] we got overwhelmed by integration efforts. I had to make a decision. I could actually have kept the schedule, if I had made a sacrifice on quality and on platform stability. And I decided not to do that, because I need to make sure that when we deliver a BlackBerry, it is best quality.” Translated, that means that there were so many features in BB10 that the company needed more time to integrate all of them into a seamless user experience.