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Comment by adventureful | Hacker News Reader

After hours price pegs their market cap at a mere $3.8 billion. Their all time high was $148.13 / share, on June 19th 2008, so almost exactly four years ago they were worth roughly $76 billion (95% destruction of value).

That averages out to losing nearly $50 million in market value every day for the last four years.

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Wow those are insane figures.

I'm wondering, why didn't they try more crazy stuff? With the amount of capital they had, I'm just so surprised that they didn't release some super advanced crap that was impractical. Anyone know? Nothing jumped of the wikipedia page for me.

All I remember is their usage of QNX, but they did a terrible job with growing the community.

Probably for roughly the same reason Nokia's old chief was putting down Apple on the cover story of Forbes when it came to who was going to dominate smart phones (November 2007 sounds right?). Like a deer in headlights that has never encountered a car before, and whose instincts were completely unprepared for it.

Is there any evidence that they ever had any "super advanced crap"? They happened to hit the combo of a nice keyboard back when you needed a keyboard and a separate server-side component that integrated with Exchange back when you needed a separate server-side component that integrated with Exchange.

Actually RIM pushed radio and mobile forward. Intel had to innovate on projects just to support RIM's early phones. Not to mention their work in networks with Telco's. They used to make phones that lasted for weeks always on....but I digress.

All I remember is their usage of QNX, but they did a terrible job with growing the community.

Apple's Rhapsody, acquired and released, not unlike RIM's story, during the company's downward spiral, was by and large a failure too. It eventually became the core of their massive success. It is not necessarily too late for RIM to turn it around.

i like both the playbook and touchpad innovativ designs - the way apps are switched, closed, etc

Because the company is and always has been lacking in any kind of vision or ambition. They have a middle management dominated corporate culture and follow the traditional hardware company pattern of treating their engineers like replaceable pawns. Exactly the wrong kind of configuration to compete in today's high tech culture.

Honestly I won't be sad to see them go, by all my friends' accounts it was a soul-sucking place to work. They had the early lead in the smartphone market and completely squandered it.

I'm just so surprised that they didn't release some super advanced crap that was impractical

Well.. there was the PlayBook...

(Maybe it wasn't super advanced, but it was impractical. No email on a Blackberry product?)

there is email now

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