Delusional CEO of Company Scrambling for Distant Third Place Says They’ll Be the “Absolute Leader” in Five Years

Thorsten Heins, CEO of BlackBerry, made two crazy “five years from now” predictions in an interview with Bloomberg:

• “In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore. Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.” And yes, if you’re going solely by BlackBerry’s disastrous experience with the Playbook, then yes. However, with Apple and Samsung tying up the supply chains, Apple selling the iPad mini at lower-than-usual margins and Amazon selling Kindle devices at a loss, a new entrant in the tablet market would either have to have a killer price or killer features. BlackBerry are prepared to deliver neither.
• “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.” Shooting for the top is what a company is supposed to aim for, and that’s exactly what he’s supposed to say. The more realistic goal isn’t so inspiring: “In five years, I want us to be in not-so-distant third place. Maybe if we’re extremely lucky, almost tied for second.”

Here’s the interview in which Heins talked about these predictions:

Heins says that he’s going after the hard-working “crazy multitaskers”, but the problem is that they’re digital omnivores — people who have a laptop, a smartphone and a tablet, and they like using all three. In fact, according to Deloitte’s recent “State of the Media Democracy” survey, these people make about 26% of the U.S. population.

Sure, he sounds delusional, but he’s saying what he has to say. If you really want delusional, you have to go back in time to 2010, at the “funeral” held for Android and iOS when Windows Phone went golden master. I was still working at Microsoft at the time — as a Windows Phone Champ, no less — and I was embarrassed.