The CEO of BlackBerry stated during an interview with Bloomberg last Monday that tablets would become useless in the near future. Oh no he didn’t.
“In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” Thorsten Heins said.
Call it a brave statement, call it a quixotic statement. His company released a tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, in 2010. It was a major flop, mainly because the PlayBook did not have native e-mail and messaging apps. The PlayBook is still in the market, though, but more of a bargain-bin item.
Despite the disappointing performance of the PlayBook, a number of BlackBerry fans are still clinging and hoping that the company would come up with a PlayBook successor that runs on the updated BlackBerry 10 operating system. But with that statement from the BlackBerry CEO, as well as his previous comments that his company would not make a tablet unless they could make a profit out of it, the possibility is close to nil.
A day after the interview was published, Blackberry issued a statement that reads: “The comments that Thorsten made yesterday are in line with previous comments he has made about the future of mobile computing overall, and the possibilities that come with a platform like BlackBerry 10. We continue to evaluate our tablet strategy, but we are not making any shifts in that strategy in the short term. When we do have information about our PlayBook strategy, we will share it.”
On the surface, Thorsten’s statement make you wonder whether it is even a possibility that tablets would become obsolete in such a short amount of time. This especially when the likes of Apple, Samsung, and even Amazon have been doing well with their respective tablets.
On the other hand, five years seems like an eternity in the tech industry. Anything can happen and sooner or later, an entirely new product would sweep off the consumers’ feet and throw away their tablets in favor for this new revolutionary device. Perhaps Thorsten was referring to the likes of Google Glass or iWatch.
Source: CNET
