BlackBerry’s president went straight up Dennis Duffy in a interview, insisting that tablets are totally going to be, like, so yesterday in five years. Thorsten Heins, BlackBerry’s CEO, did everything short of declaring himself the Pager King:
“In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” Heins said in an interview yesterday at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles. “Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.”
To be fair, Mr. Heins has a point insofar as BlackBerry is concerned: The BlackBerry PlayBook was a disaster, shipping without an email client, and only managing to sell once BlackBerry started cutting prices. And smartphones are only going to keep growing as a market.
On the other hand, it’s worth noting that most analysts think that in 2017, computer companies will move over 300 million tablets. So it seems a little bold to assume that in 2018, people are going to look at their iPad and think “You know, I really just want a BlackBerry instead.”
Although we guess Thorsten Heins is highly paid to believe precisely that, so what the hey. We just hope he didn’t bet an entire company or anything on this idea.