BlackBerry Delays Launch of BBM Apps For iOS, Android 54
USA Today reports: "BlackBerry on Saturday hit pause on the rollout of iPhone and Android apps for its popular BlackBerry Messenger mobile social messaging service after an unreleased version of the Android app was posted online. That version saw 1.1 million active users in the first 8 hours, the company said, but the unofficial version "caused issues," which the company continued to address throughout the day. The company did not specify what the issues were."
Re:If BBM is so popular... (Score:2, Informative)
They had 20,000 employees a few years ago. How many does Google or Apple have? Hint, a lot fewer.
Really? Google and Apple have fewer than 20,000 employees? Thats not true at all. In fact it is easy to prove that the above statement is utterly false. A simple wikipedia look up would show you that, as of March 2013, Google employs nearly 45,000 people and Apple employs 80,000. Meanwhile BlackBerry/RIMM had 12,700 back in March, before this recent layoff will go into effect.
You don't have to take wikipedia's word for it though. For a publicly traded company this information is available in the respective company's 10-K filings with the SEC. In Google's 2012 10-K filing they reported 53,861 employees with 19,746 in R&D. In Apple's 2012 10-K filing they reported 72,800 employees and 3300 temps and contractors (Apple did not provide an R&D headcount). In BlackBerry/RIMM's 2012 10-K they listed 16,500 employees with 6100 of those employees in R&D. New 10-K filings should be pubic next month and I would imagine that those numbers are going to be closer to what is listed in wikipedia.
In short, last year Google had more R&D staffing than Blackberry/RIMM in total headcount (Administrative, Sales, Marketing, IT, and R&D). Apple was over 4x the size of BlackBerry last year, and if the numbers on wikipedia are accurate, Apple will be nearly 10x the size of BlackBerry/RIMM when this round of layoffs are over.
I still find it amazing that with the information we have available at our fingertips, people still just make stuff like this up on the fly without any fact checking whatsoever.