BlackBerry cancels annual Live conference after 12 consecutive years

[Shawn Knight]

In what probably shouldn’t come as much of a surprise at this point, Canadian handset maker BlackBerry has canceled its annual BlackBerry Live conference for 2014. It’ll be the first time in 12 years the company won’t host a major event and is one of the first major changes under new CEO John Chen.

In a blog post announcing the change, the company said they would instead host a series of smaller, targeted events that would take place across the world over the next 12 months. These events will have a greater focus on the specific business, developer and partner audiences.

BlackBerry annual conferences were first introduced in 2002 as the Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES) and later went by the name BlackBerry World. That moniker was ultimately phased out to avoid confusion with the company’s app store by the same name and has been known as BlackBerry Live ever since.

Events like BlackBerry Live served as the perfect platform to showcase upcoming hardware. At the most recent conference, the company announced the budget-minded Q5 smartphone with a design that was reminiscent of the BlackBerry Curve.

The lack of a big conference will no doubt decrease the company’s ability to build hype for pending products but at this stage of the game, handsets probably won’t be as high of a priority as they once were. On the plus side, the lack of a flashy conference will help BlackBerry trim unnecessary costs as Chen attempts to get things going in the right direction once again.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/55116-blackberry-cancels-annual-live-conference-after-12-consecutive-years.html

 

[Guest]

danR
The projected 'success' of Chen's restructuring is a delusion. The decimation of local employment, the obliteration of the handset market in favor of services, the shift of hardware to partners in Asia at cut-throat salaries (what major player these days isn't grabbing for internal production?).

What Chen is creating isn't Blackberry/RIM 3.0. He's moving toward an enterprise that simply has rights to the name 'Blackberry'. It's like 'Indian' motorcycles. The company simply doesn't exist anymore. You get a motorcycle with the 'Indian' label stuck on it.

 

[yRaz]

I remember my first phone was the blackberry pearl and I loved that thing. Blackberry was the most popular phone of its time, and with good reason. The reason I loved them so much was the physical keyboard. With my lumia 920 it took my a few months to adjust to an onscreen keyboard. Before this I had an LG quantum, the only windows phone I could find with a physical keyboard. I'd still jump on a windows phone with a physical key board but the features I wanted simply weren't available, wp8 or android.

 

[thelatestmodel]

It doesn't matter what they do at this point, the company is doomed. Waterloo is literally bracing itself for the fallout, there's going to be thousands out of work.

 

[Jad Chaar]

I remember my first phone was the blackberry pearl and I loved that thing. Blackberry was the most popular phone of its time, and with good reason. The reason I loved them so much was the physical keyboard. With my lumia 920 it took my a few months to adjust to an onscreen keyboard. Before this I had an LG quantum, the only windows phone I could find with a physical keyboard. I'd still jump on a windows phone with a physical key board but the features I wanted simply weren't available, wp8 or android.

Yeah. BB could be a huge player if they had released BB10 earlier when the iOS vs Android battle was still in its median stage. The reason it is failing now is because the battle between mobile OS' is already dominated by Apple (iOS) and Google (Android).