BlackBerry surprised Wall Street on Friday by beating the already admittedly low-end estimates for its fourth quarter. BlackBerry's numbers were dismal — but not that dismal. In fact, the company's stock has risen about 24% over the last three months, as some investors have been sold on a comeback story.

So does BlackBerry have a shot?

The company's CEO, John Chen, has given BlackBerry a 50% chance of coming back. Some investors apparently think those are good odds, especially with Chen at the helm. After all, when he led Sybase in 1997, research firm Gartner predicted a 70% chance of that company's death at the time.

Instead, Chen took a company that had been known for server-based database software, and repositioned it as a provider of mobile solutions. When Chen joined Sybase, it had just posted four years of net losses. Thirteen years later, SAP bought Sybase for $5.8 billion. Michael Genovese, an analyst with MKM Partners, said much of the run-up in BlackBerry has come from investors' confidence in Chen.

"He's definitely smarter and better than the previous management, and he's got a good track record," Genovese said.

Facebook's $19 billion pending acquisition of WhatsApp also likely helped buoy the stock. BBM, BlackBerry's messaging service, has 85 million monthly active users versus 450 million for WhatsApp.

So far, Chen has focused on cutting costs, and making BlackBerry a leaner operation. He was encouraged, for instance, by the company's fiscal fourth-quarter results on Friday, in which its gross margin rose to 43% from 34% in the previous quarter. Channel inventory also fell 30% during that time.

Aside from cost-cutting, Chen has made a deal with Foxconn to manufacture BlackBerry devices. The plan is to produce cheap devices, and hit the Asian and Latin American marketers where the BlackBerry name has more luster, and BBM has a devoted following. Meanwhile, BlackBerry — now free of the burden of manufacturing — will reposition itself as a provider of software and services.

BlackBerry isn't abandoning the North American market, though: Chen said he's planning to have BlackBerry design high-end phones, and then produce them with a yet-unnamed manufacturer.

That's the future. For now, BlackBerry is pulling heavily from the past. In a call with analysts Friday, Chen outlined plans to ramp up production of the BlackBerry Bold, a product originally launched in 2008, which runs BlackBerry 7, a now 3-year-old operating system. BlackBerry 10, the company's latest OS, was released last January. Even the company's new concept phone, the Foxconn-produced Q20, appears to be embracing legacy technology — in this case a physical keyboard and trackpad instead of a touchscreen.

The idea seems to be an attempt to shore up hardcore BlackBerry customers who were scared off by the Q10 and and Z10 in 2013.

Genovese doesn't think the plan will work. "Chen's done a good job controlling what he can," Genovese said. "My analysis would be he's got a year."

Telecom expert Roger Entner of consulting firm Recon Analytics, was similarly skeptical. "The company is losing so much money and losing so much momentum that it's virtually impossible to come back from that," he said. "[Chen] thinks that the people who loved them in the past will love them again. That's asking a little too much."

Entner previously evoked Palm as a cautionary example for BlackBerry. Like BlackBerry, Palm was once ahead of the curve on mobile computing, but eventually lost its momentum: In 2001, the company was worth $9 billion. By 2010, HP bought it for $1.2 billion, and later abandoned the brand and its WebOS platform for mobile devices.

Ted Schadler, an analyst with Forrester Research, dismisses such talk. BlackBerry, he said, has a stronghold with highly regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals, financial services and government, which value its secure platform. (However, the last one appears to be on shaky ground since the White House is reportedly exploring alternatives.) He thinks BlackBerry can survive by securing those niches.

"It's a big world," Schadler said. "It's not a winner-take-all market. There's a good chance they'll be around." Even app development isn't that big of a deal. Developers may not be flocking to the BlackBerry platform, but most Android apps can be easily ported to the OS, he said.

So far, analysts agree that Chen has been making all the right moves. BlackBerry also has enough cash on hand — $3.2 billion plus another $500 million or so from a pending sale of the company's real estate — to give Chen about a year to really start turning things around.

Ultimately, though, BlackBerry's fate is in the hands of its customers. We'll find out soon enough if they're up for giving BlackBerry another chance.

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