After five years of decline for BlackBerry at the hands of the iPhone, and a more recent lukewarm launch of its own touchscreen flagship phone, would you bet on any prediction made by the company's CEO about the next five years of consumer technology? Probably not.
Which brings us to an interview Bloomberg News did with Thorsten Heins. The BlackBerry chief executive ventured to predict that, in half a decade's time, tablet computers would be over like a bad fad.
“In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore," Heins told Bloomberg's Hugo Miller and Nadja Brandt. "Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.”
But how is that tablet computer "business model" working out for Apple? In its quarterly earnings report was released last week, Apple disclosed that it sold 19.5 million iPads, a 65 percent year-over-year increase, to take in $8.7 billion in revenue. BlackBerry's total revenue last quarter was $2.7 billion.
It's true that the iPhone is a far bigger money-maker for Apple than the iPad. And we can agree that if BlackBerry were to invest time and money into making a dent in either the smartphone market or the tablet market, if should go for the smartphones. But most observers don't see tablets going away any time soon. Slate's Farhad Manjoo even projects iPad sales will outgrow iPhone sales by 2015.
Heins's comments run counter to other recent rhetoric coming from BlackBerry. In March, the company's director of product management was talking up the possibility of a successor to the BlackBerry tablet, the PlayBook. And back in January, according to Bloomberg, Heins said the company was considering making another tablet if it could be profitable.
Apparently, Heins has found the answer to that profitability question. And it makes sense for BlackBerry to be skittish about tablets: The PlayBook was widely considered a failure.
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