There are other related factors that seem to fit.
Time to throw in the towel when it's the first time in years the company is making a profit? Why the fuck would BlackBerry want to do that?
Because it's the first time in years the company is making a profit? Won't that mean they'd get more for it?
Yes, people have been predicting doom for Blackberry for a while, but it's hard to see some big turnaround on the horizon, with millions of people abandoning Apple and Android.
(My, how times change. The first iPhone came out a little over seven years ago, to widespread mockery: "It has no keyboard!" "It's too expensive!" "Businesses and government will never abandon their Blackberries!" And now Blackberry is a shadow of it's former self, and we're arguing whether they're totally doomed or not....)
On the bright side (?) they don't likely have the tech to weaponize anything, and will wind up killing a lot of themselves instead.. or so one can hope.
Suicidal fanatics don't need tech to weaponize ebola. They can just infect themselves, hop on a plane, and leave spit and sweat on the bathroom door handles on the plane, plus whatever they can do when they get to their destination. The incubation period is long enough for them to fly to Mexico City, get to the US border, and join a group of illegals heading north, before they become too incapacitated to travel. But they need not bother with entering illegally: they can just fly straight in to a US airport.
Or it indicates that you or the source of that information is utterly full of shit. Sounds like an urban myth, to me.
Jerry Levey, a 6-foot-6, balding, mustachioed New Jersey volunteer fireman who wears his keys jingling on his belt, drinks Budweiser and crushes the cans when he finishes, stared dumbstruck at Mark Newman.
Mark Newman, a 6-foot-6, balding, mustachioed New Jersey volunteer fireman who wears his keys jingling on his belt, drinks Budweiser and crushes the cans when he finishes, stared dumbstruck at Jerry Levey.
The men were identical in almost every visible respect. [...]
For example, why do Newman and Levey have similar styles of dress, opinions and IQs? Is their shared taste for Budweiser inborn, the result of upbringing or mere coincidence? Was their passion for 3 a.m. takeout Chinese food determined in their childhood homes, or by chromosomes? [...]
Both men remember that, growing up in different households, in towns 65 miles apart, they were fascinated by fire trucks and firefighters.
Both became volunteer firemen but say they still yearn to be full-time firefighters.
When they met, Levey made his living installing fire-suppression equipment, such as sprinklers.
Newman made his living installing fire alarms.
Previously, Levey had worked for a lawn-chemical company; Newman installed lawn sprinklers.
"Before that," Newman said, "we both worked for supermarkets, both worked at gas stations, and he went to college for forestry, and I worked directly in the field, as a tree surgeon." [...]
People are often astonished to hear about the New Jersey twins' almost eerie similarities - and more astonished to learn that such striking similarities are the rule, not the exception, among the 100 sets of twins in the Minnesota study.
There is no gene which makes you "good at business".
And how do you know that? Studies of identical twins separated at birth and raised apart have found remarkable things: I remember an account of one case where as adults, both men had (among other similarities) chosen identical belt buckles, smoked the same brand of cigarettes, and held the packs in rolled up sleeves of their T-shirts in the same way. Of course, nobody says that proves there's a "belt-buckle choice gene," but it seems to indicate that genes can influence behavior in complex ways we do not understand. The idea that some genetic patterns might make you (on average) better at business is not outlandish at all.
Google's been pissing away cash on monorail projects ever since the IPO.
Robert X. Cringely's opinion is that many Google research projects are Larry Page's way to keep Sergey Brin out of his hair.
I said it last month, but will say it again:
Size matters. Desktop PCs are easy to make modular (unless you want an iMac). Laptops are harder, and besides removable batteries, only a few had any modular components (like a DVD drive swappable for an extra battery). Phones are much more space-constrained. Every millimeter counts, and modularity takes up quite a bit of space at that scale, because each part needs to be enclosed, securely attach to the others, etc.
In short, a modular phone is possible, but the trade-offs will be severe, and you'll be able to pick one or two things (e.g. speed, battery life, extra features, small size, etc.) but not all at the same time. And the prices won't be good, because manufacturer(s) will lose economies of scale: it'll be hard to compete with Apple and Samsung making millions and tens of millions of identical units.
"I bought a cheap-ass phone and it sucks"
It's worse than that. It's more: "I bought a cheap-ass phone and it sucks and thus the free market has failed."
I'll admit micropayments don't remove the problem of click-bait, which already exists. And there could be fraud, e.g. claiming something is 1 cent to read, but charging $1. But I think a lot of that can be solved be reputation and common sense, i.e. you might not want to click on that
This is because most or all website revenue comes from advertising. CBS has ads, but Netflix doesn't. Books don't, and newspapers and magazines have a limited amount, because part of their revenue comes from selling their publications to consumers. (Without ads, a copy of something like National Geographic or Playboy would cost $20 or more.)
The problem is that we don't have a good way of buying small amounts of content online. You can subscribe to some sites by the month or year, or perhaps buy limited access via PayPal, but the cost tends to be $ or $$ or $$$, and nobody wants to subscribe to CNN or YouTube. They want to see that video now, with no registration and commitment. The answer is the great lost Internet opportunity of 15 years ago: micropayments. If there was an easy and universal system for paying (say) a few cents to watch a video, why not? It'd be trivial for viewers, but could add up to real money for sites.
If I were a huge content provider, I'd figure out a way to make it happen, perhaps through ISPs. Subsidize them to give every user maybe $10/month credit. Offer content providers a great deal to install a one-click "Read/Watch Now for 1 cent" buttons. Get people used to paying tiny amounts of money to view content. If something like this could get going, it'd benefit content providers of all sizes. E.g. a comedian who writes one joke a day could make a living with 10,000 readers paying 1 cent per day ($100/day = $36,500/year).
With your bare hands?!?