Heins continued: “Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.”
So what makes a good business model? Without explicitly referring to modular computing — your phone as your primary computer, docking into individual hardware shells as needed — Heins remarked, “In five years, I see BlackBerry to be the absolute leader in mobile computing — that’s what we’re aiming for. I want to gain as much market share as I can, but not by being a copycat.”
Not worrying too much about being competitive in the tablet space? That would definitely qualify as not being a copycat. We still have the next five years before tablets are unnecessary, if you subscribe to Heins’ logic, though. It’ll be interesting to see if the company’s BlackBerry PlayBook line has already been put out to pasture for good or if we’ll at least see incremental updates here and there.
BlackBerry CEO Questions Future of Tablets [Bloomberg]