RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis was just on stage at the Dive Into Mobile conference, babbling on about who knows what. It seems he's trying to justify his reasons for wanting to stick with outdated smartphone tech. Instead, he's borderline incomprehensible.
RIM has been taking plenty of criticism lately for what many perceive to be bad strategy when it comes to their approach to smartphones, and the OS that powers those phones. This interview didn't do much to prove RIM's naysayers wrong.
Based on what All Things D tells us, Lazaridis basically was a living, breathing contradiction for 30 minutes. It started off well enough, mentioning the Playbook's Q1 2011 release window and explaining that the QNX Playbook OS is an entirely new technology, that's not related to the Blackberry OS at all.
But then it fell apart. Lazaridis started trying to explain how Blackberry is focused on Enterprise (but they've crossed over!), and how they're not trying to cram a tablet OS into a smartphone (because BB 6 still rules! But Playbook OS will someday be on smartphones!). Even hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher had trouble keeping up with his train of thought.
Take, for example, this inane exchange:
Mike: We're running a business. We invented the smartphone. We decided to go global.
Walt: So did you decided to chain yourself to lowest common denominator technology?
Mike: Technical discussion of multicores. Says competitors learning how big a market there is. We built our own technology, etc.
Rattles off tech certifications. Walt: "I don't know what those mean."
Or maybe consider this gem from the Q&A session, courtesy of Engadget:
Q: So I own a Torch, but it's slow and has a low res screen. I'm confused, you're creating a false dichotomy between the PlayBook and the smartphone. I don't understand that. How can you deliver this phone without the best hardware available today? You seem to be looking to the tablet for that. But this is a tiny tablet. What is the strategy? Why are you demoting my phone?
Mike: First of all, the Torch was designed to be a launch vehicle for BB 6. That argument could be used in reverse. In a world where Half VGA was high performance, the world had moved on to 1GHz CPUs and higher res displays... when you see how quickly that phone moves around, just imagine the next generation...
So, Mike, What ARE you really talking about? [All Things D]
Photo Credit: Asa Mathat/All Things D