North (formerly Thalmic Labs, now Google)

[jeffster]

Rampant speculation follows.

It may be the case that owning the manufacturing process outright was the wrong choice. Perhaps after a few months of reality it was determined that there are better/cheaper/faster ways to build the products elsewhere, or they were able to use their own facility as a lever to get better deals with manufacturers elsewhere. The price drop may or may not be relevant here.

You're giving me flashbacks to BlackBerry moving its production to Mexico, which became one of the nails in the coffin...

I think the issue with BlackBerry was that the "Waterloo way" and the opinion from their staff was that business people had zero need for any fun apps and non-productivity apps and therefore no need to made a device capable of running "real" apps. So Apple and Android ended up burying BlackBerry large.

I had a friend that worked there and I had suggested that BlackBerry needs to compete with Apple and Android (long before Apple had the following of what BlackBerry had) and the opinion was that Apple would absolutely fail with their "stupid keyless" phone and Android would never take off either because of security issues (if you recall, some early Androids did have keyboards).

As for "North", perhaps people still aren't ready for their product. However, I don't think moving production to somewhere cheaper is going to hurt them. And I don't think the Mexico production hurt BlackBerry. BlackBerry had already cooked their dinner due to their stubbornness. BlackBerry would be still huge if only they listened to all those that told them that they needed to changed years before they decided to change.