John Chen Removes "Interim" from his BlackBerry CEO Title

Almost 10 weeks ago on Nov. 4, 2013, John Chen took over as interim CEO of BlackBerry. This came as part of the deal made with the Fairfax Financial group of investors. This investment of $1 billion took BlackBerry off of the selling block.

Since that time, Chen has made a lot of changes with respect to not only the top senior executive staff, but also in the way that BlackBerry will conduct its business. The first and most noticeable change was that Thorsten Heins would leave the company by the end of the day.

The following morning, John Chen was recognized as the interim CEO of BlackBerry. Many staff changes have taken place since that time. The latest change in Chen’s house cleaning efforts was to hire Ron Louks. This happened just two weeks ago.

Chen has said in several statements that he wants to bring BlackBerry back to its former self. Towards that end, he made the following statement, “On our path to return BlackBerry to profitability, nothing is more important than remaining deeply connected to our customers, and designing and delivering secure products that exceed their expectations.”

Part of this involves focusing more on the software and security side for government and enterprise use that BlackBerry has always been known for. This is something that I have been seeing and mentioning in BlackBerry even before Chen took hold of the reins. He also formulated a deal with Foxconn to outsource the design (and admittedly most of the risk that comes with) of its handset business.

Now after almost two and a half months as interim CEO, Chen has decided to drop the “interim” part of his title. Adam Emery, who is a spokesman for BlackBerry confirmed to the New York Times this title change.

Emery said, "After earnings, and again in meetings with media and analysts at C.E.S., John said that he would be BlackBerry’s C.E.O. until the company is back on solid financial footing. The search for a CEO has been put on the back burner for now.

This announcement was made at this year’s CES show in Las Vegas. It was also mentioned at the show that BlackBerry would be introducing a new smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard soon. This is something that BlackBerry is very good at. I had a BlackBerry Curve and Torch for a long time.

In fact, it is suing a company called Typo for making a QWERTY keyboard that looks 99.5 percent like the BlackBerry iconic keyboard. In a related statement about returning to its physical roots, Chen said "The market has spoken and we have listened."

Returning the focus of BlackBerry on government and corporate software and security, re-focusing on handheld devices with physical keyboards and the recent staff changes have all made investors give Chen a thumbs-up. Now we will have to see how long the thumbs stay up for the new CEO of BlackBerry, John Chen.