RIM, which has struggled to keep its BlackBerry line of smartphones relevant amid increasing competition from the iPhone and Android, today replaced co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis with a little-known executive by the name of Thorsten Heins. (Full release here).
Who is Thorsten Heins? Well, as part of the introductory process, the company posted a YouTube video (see below) for folks to get to know him a bit better. The PR strategy is taking a bit of a beating in the tech press and on Twitter, largely due to Heins’ subdued conversational style.
“This guy doesn’t exactly make you want to run through a wall to smash the competition,” writes Jay Yarrow of Business Insider. Journalist Glenn Fleishman was a bit more harsh, saying in a Tweet that the video “couldn’t be any more jaw-dropping than if it were a FunnyOrDie parody.”
Here are just a few of the one liners from the video:
“If we continue doing well what we are doing, I see no problems of us being in the top three players worldwide in the next years in wireless.”
“At the very core of RIM, at its DNA is how I’d describe it, is the innovation. I mean we always think ahead. We always think forward. We sometimes think the unthinkable, and that is fantastic. This is the core of any high technology company. We’ve learned to execute, yes, we have to get better at execution, but we’ve learned a lot going from when I joined RIM in 2007. So, never lose this innovation spirit.”
“We are a great innovative company, but sometimes we innovate too much while we are building a product.”
Previously on GeekWire: Who could buy RIM? A laundry list of potential suitors
