Hasta La Gadget!

Canada’s smartphone industry pioneer BlackBerry is giving a lot more thought to taking the company private, according to a new report from Reuters. The strategy has been tabled before, but CEO Thorsten Heins and the BlackBerry Board of Directors are increasingly mulling the possibility of paying off shareholders and structuring a private equity deal to give them a chance to avoid continued public scrutiny.

The message from BlackBerry’s communications department has been pretty consistent regarding its recent quarterly performance, as well as issues like layoffs and executive departures – the company is still in turnaround mode, and needs to make more changes to get the organization ship-shape before it can return to growth. But that’s not a refrain that investors enjoy hearing – especially not when the track’s on repeat.

Going private would dramatically narrow the field of those the company has to be accountable to, and give it a chance to do some of the hard work it needs to do behind closed doors, without so many cooks in the kitchen. It’s a similar strategy to what Dell is currently attempting to do, with Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake Partners slugging it out with public stockholders to take the PC company private.

Michael Dell says he wants to make his company “more founder led than it was in its first few decades,” arguing that this will benefit customers as it transfers risks to he and Silver Lake, while pursuing a more aggressive restructuring strategy designed to put Dell in a position to profit from a changing PC market.

BlackBerry’s Heins hasn’t expressed any similar desires so far, and in fact seemed reluctant to consider the option, preferring instead to make a big bet on BlackBerry 10 and its attendant BB10-powered handsets. So far, that hasn’t prompted quite the resurgence in consumer interest. That could have helped the company warm to the idea of a private equity deal, but also may have made it less likely that BlackBerry can find an interested partner.

The news of late has not be great for BlackBerry, with executive departures and budget cuts leading to layoffs in key areas. Yesterday, it did secure approval from the U.S. Department of Defense to supply that agency with BlackBerry 10 devices, but that’s not a huge win: it will result in 30,000 devices being used by the DOD by the end of the year, but really it would’ve been more surprising if BlackBerry’s latest was rejected for use. In other words, all options are probably on the table, given the state of affairs, and going private might be among the most palatable of those.

As part of recent restructuring and cost-cutting efforts, Sony’s Computer Entertainment (SCE) division will merge its Asian and Japanese operations into a single entity. The company said that it would result in a new management unit, with SCE Japan president Hiroshi Kawano taking the helm and the Asian unit’s ex-chief, Hiroyuki Oda becoming his deputy. Departments like marketing and finance will also merge in an effort to save cash, as the company hopes to stanch all the recent bleeding and try to make its fiscal 2012 a throwback to the glory days.

Filed under: Gaming, Sony

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Source: Sony

It’s never easy to share news of job losses, but that’s the state of things at T-Mobile’s US headquarters in Bellevue, Wash. Today, the carrier confirmed to us that layoffs are currently underway, which comes in advance of the UnCarrier’s merger with MetroPCS. While T-Mobile representatives withheld specifics, The Seattle Times reports that somewhere between 200 and 300 employees have been laid off, whose jobs range from administrative assistants to senior vice presidents. This news follows reports of job cuts earlier this month, which are said to have affected more than 100 people in the marketing department and other divisions. For its part, T-Mobile suggests the decision was made in order to better focus its resources, which seems plausible, given its scrappy new approach in the mobile industry. It’s certainly a bitter pill to swallow, but you’ll find the carrier’s statement after the break.

Filed under: Wireless, Mobile, T-Mobile

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Source: The Seattle Times (1), (2)

The pain from recently announced job cuts by AMD could ripple out to the Linux community, as the chipmaker has shut down a small but important Linux OS research facility in Dresden, Germany. The center housed 25 employees who helped port AMD technology like PowerNow over to new Linux distros, and according to The H, many engineers who submitted major processor and chipset revisions for the OS would be pink slipped. The closure won’t affect GPU and APU development, according to the source, but it’s not yet known exactly who will pick up the slack from the former Dresden team — though the research center in Austin Texas is reported to be a likely bet.

Filed under: Software

AMD shutters key Linux support lab in Germany as part of company-wide layoffs originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Nov 2012 07:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Following big news from Jolla almost two weeks ago, it’s reluctant to go quiet, instead taking to Twitter to announce that Jussi Hurmola is no longer its CEO. This isn’t a story of scandal or corporate dissent, but merely a restructuring to allow Hurmola to focus on Sailfish, the MeeGo-based OS currently in development. It’s no great surprise that Marc Dillon is stepping up to be the new big cheese — he’s another of the company’s founders and was acting COO prior to the shuffle. Sailfish is due to be demoed for the first time in a little over a month, where we imagine Hurmola will be eager to flaunt its progress now that he’s managed to palm off all that paperwork.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile

Jolla’s Marc Dillon takes over as CEO, Jussi Hurmola to focus on Sailfish originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Oct 2012 16:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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