What is BlackBerry without the phone? New CEO rubbishes rumours

BlackBerry surprised the business and tech world with its decision to accept a $1 billion cash injection from a group of investors led by Canadian financier Prem Watsa and end an auction process that many investors had hoped would have led to a sale of the company or some of its assets.

Among the changes was the appointment of John Chen as interim CEO of the company, with Thorsten Heins stepping down. The transition has led to a number of reports, including the fact that the company may stop selling phones to concentrate on software.

However Chen, who spoke to the BlackBerry obsessive CrackBerry has sought to allay many of those fears, adding that it really was too early to speculate.

“I’ve only been on the clock now for almost 24 hours – I think that if I made those statements right now conclusively, somebody should pull me out and shoot me”, said Chen, adding that questions like whether or not BlackBerry was going to get out of the handset business, were ridiculous.

“I have to say this Kevin, and you know this very well… what is BlackBerry without the device? The question is, can we do more in that? It’s not about let’s not do this and do that. Sometimes it’s not business sensible to make those statements”, he added.

The brouhaha over whether or not BlackBerry would stay in the handset business partly began after the Associated Press quoted Chen as saying that BlackBerry employees need to start thinking differently about the company and accept that “we’re really not in phones but we’re in phones for software, for services.”

The statement of course, provoked a flurry of reactions.

Colin Gillis, an industry analyst at BGC Financial, in comments to AP, questioned whether that was even possible. “It’s like Apple saying we’re going to stop making phones and we’re going to become an iMessage company,” Gillis said.

Chen subsequently also told Reuters that he had no intention of discontinuing BlackBerry’s handset production. “In a brief telephone interview, he vowed to rebuild the Canadian firm’s once booming handset business”, the news agency said.

In the CrackBerry interview, however, Chen did say that he would be looking for a ‘software person’ and not a ’tech’ person to take over the CEO role in the long term.

“I have tremendous respect for the technology people in the company. I don’t think I’m looking for a tech person, plus I came out as an engineer. I think I have certain sensitivity to whether these technologies are real or too good to be true. I have some sense on that so I think I could use some help on sales, marketing and services”, he said.