Uh-oh, this seems to be the beginning of the end for BB: once you get into this looking for a good CEO candidate thing, things generally do not go back up, e.g.

Uh-oh, this seems to be the beginning of the end for BB: once you get into this looking for a good CEO candidate thing, things generally do not go back up, e.g. Yahoo, Motorola. BB's problems are myriad, but to me a single problem stands out clearly, and it's not Amazon's competition: It's the hapless nature of their store associates: i) In BB stores, when you walk in it's always hard to find an associate. ii) When you do find them, they tend to be starry-eyed young guys who know next to nothing about the products and usually resort to random searching of the aisles, which of course you could have done yourself. iii) When they need to check for product info, e.g. "Do you have it in stock"", "Does this work with that?" They have to walk back to a computer screen on their desk and check using the browser, which of course you could have done much faster on your phone. It's hard to create a low-paid task force that's also knowledgeable about the intricacies of tons of electronic products. So the solution is to use in-store tablets with a helper app running on them. In other words, go to an Apple store, observe for 15 minutes, come back and replicate. BB already has great inventory APIs, coming up with a very useful v1.0 shouldn't be hard.