Five months into his reign, Research in Motion CEO Thorsten Heins will be facing the toughest crowd of them all in Orlando next week: Disgruntled BlackBerry developers who are quickly losing faith in their platform.
Reuters is reporting that Research in Motion will hold their annual BlackBerry World conference in Orland, Florida next week, but given the rough year the company has had, it's likely to be a considerably more subdued affair.
While Apple's similar WWDC event held in San Francisco June 11-15 sold out in just two hours and Google I/O is likely to enjoy a similar fate, BlackBerry World is expected to focus more on stopping the company's bleeding more than about new BlackBerry 10 products, which aren't expected until October at the earliest.
RIM has already reduced the size of the event by cancelling a traditional presentation for financial analysts in the wake of a string of bleak news from the company. That event will now be held closer to when the new BlackBerry 10 products go on sale later in the year.
"In the year since RIM's last Orlando conference, the company has issued a string of disappointing financial results, suffered an embarrassing global network outage and watched its share price tumble by 75 percent," the report notes. "Lazaridis and Balsillie quit under pressure in late January, replaced by Heins, a former Siemens AG executive who ran RIM's hardware business for several years."
"Expectations are so low I don't think it's possible to disappoint investors," said National Bank Financial analyst Kris Thompson. "The conference isn't for investors anyway; it's for customers, developers and partners."
Perhaps the biggest news from BlackBerry World will arrive in the form of a prototype BlackBerry 10 device, which RIM is expected to hand out to developers for testing of their apps. While the company is stressing this hardware "bears no relation to the finished product," you can bet that tech blogs will get their hands on one in search of clues to as to where the once-iconic product might be heading.
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(Image courtesy of BGR)
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