There has been a lot of speculation about BlackBerry’s future over the past few months. Uncertainty about it going private has finally ended, Fairfax is not going to acquire it rather it has pumped in an investment of $1 billion with other institutional investors. As a result, BlackBerry has shown CEO Thorsten Heins the door and has brought on distinguished turnaround expert John S. Chen as the interim CEO and executive chairman of the board. Chen said yesterday that there are no plans to shut down BlackBerry’s ailing handset business and that the company won’t be jumping on the Android bandwagon anytime soon.
Quite a lot of people are of the view that BlackBerry should simply adopt Android as the OS, seeing as how even its BB10 platform failed to turn its fortunes around. Chen doesn’t think that way. He tells CrackBerry that they “need to preserve the reason why BlackBerry is around,” which is obviously its own software platform and handset division. When queried about a possible jump on the Android bandwagon, Chen says that at this point in time “jumping to anything is inappropriate.” BlackBerry hasn’t said for how long Chen is going to stay on as interim CEO, though he says that he’s searching for a “software person” who also understands the services side of the business to come on as permanent CEO.
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