BlackBerry Officially Open To Sale 139
Nerval's Lobster writes "BlackBerry is considering whether to sell itself off to the highest bidder. The company's Board of Directors has announced the founding of a Special Committee to explore so-called 'strategic alternatives to enhance value and increase scale,' which apparently includes 'possible joint ventures, strategic partnerships or alliances, a sale of the Company or other possible transactions.' BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins added that, while the committee did its work, the company would continue to its recent overhead-reduction strategy. Prem Watsa, chairman and CEO of Fairfax Financial—BlackBerry's largest shareholder—announced that he would resign from the company's board in order to avoid a potential conflict of interest. News that BlackBerry is considering a potential sale should surprise nobody. Faced with fierce competition from Google and Apple, the company's market-share has tumbled over the past several quarters. In a desperate bid to regain its former prominence in the mobile-device industry, BlackBerry developed and released BlackBerry 10, a next-generation operating system meant to compete toe-to-toe against Google Android and Apple iOS—despite a massive ad campaign, however, early sales of BlackBerry 10 devices have proven somewhat underwhelming."
Once iOS and Android Licensed Exchange (Score:5, Interesting)
It was over for blackberry. Mr. CEO could now check his email on the exchange server, sync his calendars, and the rest without the purchase and maintenance of an extra (and rather expensive) Blackberry Enterprise Server. Once that happened, it was game over for Blackberry.
Once Android licensed Exchange it was much the same way.
Re:Once iOS and Android Licensed Exchange (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Once iOS and Android Licensed Exchange (Score:5, Informative)
blue chip companies are in the process of rolling out iOS and android and dumping blackberry
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blue chip companies are in the process of rolling out iOS and android and dumping blackberry
Which in some situations is a bad thing, given that Blackberrys (and BES) have pretty good security certifications:
http://us.blackberry.com/business/topics/security/certifications.html
Not important for regular folks, but if you're dealing with health data or financials, something that should be heavily considered IMHO.
Re:If MS (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as BB holds on, Microsoft has competition for the third place. In effect, unless BB completely disappears, it's balkanizing RT sales. By buying BB, if nothing else, it consolidates third place. From there, well, maybe it can take on Apple. I doubt it will ever really dent Android, which is too vast and on just about every price point for mobile devices.
It could do other things, like embed BES into Exchange, which has interesting possibilities. As awful as BES is to deal with, it has advantages over Activesync.
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Nokia / Microsoft is focusing on the mid range primarily. They are aiming at higher and of Android's customer base not primarily Apple's.
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Not really. In some blue chips Blackberry is still in use. But they've lost huge share even in large enterprise and government.
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It might still make sense for Microsoft to buy them, close shop, sell their assets and return the money the the shareholders. MS does not want any alternative to Exchange and Windows Phone.
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Unfortunately, there is: IBM/Lotus Notes+Domino. My company unfortunately uses that crap.
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Is it? They've been losing market share steadily over the last few years, some of their newer products aren't selling as well as they'd hoped, and people are proportionally buying more devices of anything but BlackBerry.
Their PlayBook was a bit of a flop, and they've stopped providing updates for it.
Except for entrenched people who are still using it, my perception of BlackBerry isn't a brand which is still strong -- it's a brand in decline desperate to stay relevant as the smartphon
Re:Once iOS and Android Licensed Exchange (Score:4, Insightful)
In blue-chip companies, Blackberry is still king.
No, they are not. I've worked for three Fortune-30's in the last few years, and all three of them have moved to iOS / Android as their preferred platform.
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It was over for blackberry. Mr. CEO could now check his email on the exchange server, sync his calendars, and the rest without the purchase and maintenance of an extra (and rather expensive) Blackberry Enterprise Server. Once that happened, it was game over for Blackberry.
Once Android licensed Exchange it was much the same way.
Arguably, it was a two-stage kill: Microsoft's late-and-largely-unlamented PocketPC/Windows Mobile (pre 7) implemented "activesync" ages ago to compete with RIM (indeed, after a brief period of attempting to eat Palm's lunch, attempting to eat RIM's lunch became their chief purpose in life); but that didn't help all that much because WinMo devices made Blackberries look like elegant triumphs of engineering and UI design.
Once a device that consumers loved, and an increasingly bearable and very cheap OS licen
There's more to (business) mobile than email sync (Score:5, Insightful)
For all of it's faults, BlackBerry does all of that very well.
Is it enough? Only time will tell, but I wouldn't write them off yet.
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Re:There's more to (business) mobile than email sy (Score:4, Insightful)
And side-loading is a serious issue for some businesses.
I fear that BlackBerrry's problem is that the size of the market for their USPs is pretty narrow.
They are still way best in class, but that class is small.
Re:There's more to (business) mobile than email sy (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're managing large numbers of mobile devices then you also want to manage app versions, manage upgrades... BlackBerry does all of that very well....Is it enough?
Unfortunately, no, it is not enough.
What you are talking about is mostly something only large businesses are interested in doing. For the vast percentage of companies - the small and medium enterprises (SME) - the above is not a priority for them (arguably, it /should/ be). They want to minimize IT spending, which usually means letting employees use their own devices (again, arguably a more central control might reduce the overall IT cost but it requires a larger outlay up front, which SMEs want to avoid).
When Blackberry was king, these added features - app management, etc. - were nice bonuses to Blackberry's central advantage: email everywhere. But its not why most people used the phones. Now that other smartphones have (mostly) matched Blackberry in its central strength -email - , SMEs are debating whether those extra features are worth the cost. Increasingly, they are deciding it is not, especially since they require IT cost to maintain BES server to take advantage of those features. Better to just let the employees bring their own cheap devices and let them connect via Exchange. There's no need to provide the hardware (either by directly providing the employee with the phone, or indirectly by making the employee get his own Blackberry but balancing that out with better pay) or worry about support costs.
For large enterprises, the additional features of the Blackberry bring worthwhile benefits, and the extra cost is practically unnoticeable to them, so they will likely keep to Blackberry as long as they can. More, large enterprises already have large IT teams so BES is just another assignment for that division. But large enterprises comprise only a few percent of total businesses. SMEs are 95% of all businesses in the US and 75% of the workforce. Its a significant loss.
Once iOS and Android sold out to the NSA. (Score:1)
Except that with the recent Snowden revelations, the security of the Blackberry is looking better and better especially with Microsoft and Apple being in bed with the NSA.
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Uh, Blackberry has already allowed India to spy on encrypted messages, what makes you think the NSA isn't already monitoring that traffic?
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Or that BB hasn't done the exact same thing for the NSA -- once they've done it for one government, there is zero reason to believe they wouldn't for another.
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Yes, that's what I meant - poor choice of words on my part. The NSA is likely already monitoring all Blackberry encrypted traffic. Posting half-awake doesn't really help either...
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As a bonus, RIM's servers are in Canada, so that pesky "constitution" thing does not apply at all to the data.
Re:Once iOS and Android sold out to the NSA. (Score:4, Interesting)
In all fairness, BlackBerry made damn sure everyone knew that they had handed the keys over and created plenty of lead time so people in India could have alternative solutions. They handled this as responsible as they could have. That's not remotely similar to the USA situation with the telcos of secretly handing customer data over.
Re:Once iOS and Android sold out to the NSA. (Score:4, Informative)
However, BlackBerry's BES (business) security was not affected. Each enterprise keeps its own keys, not BlackBerry. There was nothing to hand over to the government. The government would have to go to each business individually and demand the keys.
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(most Mac users I know don't even know what version of OS X they're using!)
You say that as if Mac users are more ignorant or something. Most *Windows* users (a far larger sample) don't know what version they're using. That's a far worse showing since there's only been 4 major choices for consumers in the last 10 years (XP, Vista, 7, 8) compared to OSX's 8 major versions.
For Mac, Windows and Android, the average person's (correct) answer as to what major OS version they're using is "whatever it came with when I bought it." (iOS on the other hand has an extremely high adoption rate
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It was over for blackberry.
If that were true, Windows phone would have hammered the market however a sickening thud was all that was heard.
Android and Apple got to the market first while Blackberry was still sporting it's banal interface and relying on entrenched government contracts for it's bread-and-butter. That was a ridiculous short-sighted and lazy gamble by BB. They are now trying to change directions in mid-stream but everyone has already moved on and they are arriving at the party with an empty keg. BB should have gotten
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Android and Apple got to the market first while Blackberry was still sporting it's banal interface and relying on entrenched government contracts for it's bread-and-butter. That was a ridiculous short-sighted and lazy gamble by BB.
It may have been short-sighted but it wasn't lazy. The problem was that RIM saw what Android and iPhone did, and honestly thought that nobody would want it. I recall reading an interview with a RIM engineer at the time saying they laughed when they saw the iPhone because all the feedback they had ever got from customers (who were all corporations) was that users wanted long battery life, a good keyboard and strong enterprise management.
They just totally missed that with the advent of the iPhone and later An
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Well that and competitors to BlackBerry messenger.
I remember hearing that BlackBerrys are pretty common in some poorer countries, mostly because of BlackBerry messenger helped avoid high SMS fees.
Now, you have Line, WhatsApp, iMessage, and more and more competitors to that advantage. Then, as BlackBerry market shrinks, it gets less and less useful due to network effects. They're talking about releasing BBM clients to other OSes, which may have worked at some point - cannibalize some sales in order to keep s
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Thing is, Blackberry should have seen the writing on the wall the day ActiveSync was announced. It didn't take a great deal of imagination to see this as being Microsoft's way of muscling in on Blackberry's turf.
Switch to android (Score:2)
Re:Switch to android (Score:4, Informative)
Yes that is hard. Many of BlackBerry's best features rely on BBOS or QNX. Android doesn't have them. It would be a massive porting effort. Android is often open source so once they finished porting they would have to share what they wrote with Samsung.
Given that BB10 already has compatibility with Android application, what does Android do for them?
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"Open Source" doesn't force you to share anything. The BSDs, X, Apache, etc., are all "open source".
You may have meant Android is GPL'd / Copyleft / Free Software, but that's absolutely NOT true, as basically only the Linux kernel is GPL'd, while the rest of Android is under freer licenses. The preferred license is the Apache 2.0 license (similar to MIT/X).
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That line in context was about kernel level features in particular porting Balance. So yes, that would be against the Linux Kernel, so the GPL would apply.
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You might have MEANT that, but you sure didn't say so. Neither did the GP.
Calling it open source when you meant GPL/free software, and also calling it "Android" when you apparently meant Linux specifically, only served to completely confuse any point you were trying to make.
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Yes it did make them look bad. They floundered a lot. In 2010 they were still king of the hill, dictated terms to others and exploring expanding into complex verticals. It took time for them to realize they could lose it all.
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Isolate driver failures? Aside that, QNX is a real-time microkernel with guaranteed scheduling, so it can ensure that, say, your phone doesn't freeze up when you get an incoming call. Android can't promise that.
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First off, it doesn't really matter what QNX can do vs. Linux. RIM/Blackberry wrote their features against QNX. They would have to rewrite chunks of them against Linux or XNU (BTW iOS kernel is XNU not Mach).
There are plusses and minus to QNX. QNX offers much better automated syntonization so low level routines in Linux have hand-coded syntonization while QNX code frequently doesn't. QNX applications have deterministic execution times which means that chunks of the code know that process X is finished b
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Yes it did. And moving it to Linux would require another porting effort.
Dude, it is a typo. Autocorrection
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You said it yourself; QNX is a microkernel, while Linux is not. Go look up all the benefits of microkernels, and you'll have your answer.
A few quickies: The security can be absolutely impervious to attackers (see OpenVMS winning in every hackathon). The system can be mind-bogglingly stable, even if the drivers are crap and crash all the time (see OpenVMS at the top of every uptime chart). The system can run
Yes. (Score:1)
And build hardened Android phones for business. There, was that all that hard?
Yes.
Because I spent a few hundred bucks on each and it'll cost me a few hundred bucks more to switch.
And I have a budget.
And needlessly spending money on technology is a waste of money when what I have works quite well.
Lastly, following the "latest" and "greatest" is idiotic - it's falling into the marketing people's bullshit. At the time, Blackberry was the best thing out there.
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it's pretty hard when they've invested all their time for past years for buying another os and doing crap..
but you know what? what sucked about bb always was availability outside of carriers.
how the fuck could I buy one or develope for one if I HAVE NEVER SEEN ONE ON SALE LOCALLY- and this is in Finland. RIM has always ignored large parts of global market, that is to say that they were never a truly global player.
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Excluding BB10, to have a BlackBerry function you either needed BIS or BES. If there was no fairly extensive carrier support nor was it being purchased for a corporate client with a BES the phone wouldn't work. Finland is Nokia country. I'm not shocked carriers didn't want to give RIM a complex feature set to do stuff that Nokia / Symbian mostly already did.
HP (Score:3)
Maybe HP will buy them. It worked out so well for them last time.
Re:HP (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe HP will buy them. It worked out so well for them last time.
Maybe they could have a bidding war with Yahoo... They've been moving aggressively into HP's "Where Technologies go to Die" turf lately, and a line of Yahoo! Mail branded blackberries would be perfect as a component of Yahoo's "Just think of us as a weighted average of Google and AOL" strategy.
Good luck (Score:1, Informative)
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I had someone in a bar complaining about the exact same problem. I don't know if this works for all providers, but for Verizon Blackberries, all you ever had to do was hold down 1 to quickdial voicemail.
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I bid a buck if I can have the SMT parts (Score:2)
always short of resistors...
Little lost blacksheep (Score:3)
BB remains the only handset/technical network that I can put users on a world wide tariff and provide a secure service at a reasonable cost. Period.
Sadly, Blackberry seems to be run by idiots, who don't understand their own strength, or their own product.
And yes, I can put my users on Iphones and on Android and I can cry my eyes out as soon as they leave the borders of the country they live in.
Even *if* they remodelled the business in software, they could still leveage BB core work and sell a really workable product. Yes, not for everyone, and yes, aimed at corp, business and gov - but they seem lost in terms of what they are.
Lying to the customer base is bad too and Thorsten Heinz needs to be fired. The Playbook isn't getting 10? Liar.
CEO's that lie or get their baseline facts wrong are worthless. They are worthless to whom they work for and worse for their customer. He had his shot - he should resign.
Pride (Score:5, Insightful)
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Same exact thing happened over at Motorola. Same exact thing happened over at Nokia. Three companies at the top of the cellphone world, insi
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Actually, I think your analysis is off. Their real problem, in my opinion, is that they never got their systems working smoothly.
Configuring a BB server is a bitch, and it all depends on connectivity to RIM, which is a dumbass move. Then they put out several generations of handset that failed during normal use due to design flaws, and then they rolled out BB10 which doesn't sync as well as the older system, and crippled their companion tablets in the process instead of providing the software upgrade they'
dont listen (Score:2)
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Corporate customers aren't supposed to want Windows 8. They are mostly satisfied with Windows 7. What Windows 8 will do though is make them unsatisfied with Windows 7 style applications, forcing vertical applications to code for Metro prior to the time when Android is ready to act as a primary OS. They don't need to want it, they just need to accept it.
Grow up and invest in hardware (Score:1)
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Huh? BlackBerry is in the hardware business. They don't just produce an OS and a software they do hardware as well.
Disclaimer (Score:3)
so.... having someone buy and dismantle blackberry (Score:2)
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reliability (Score:5, Insightful)
Feel free to disagree, but I think what killed BB in the end was losing their reputation for reliability. They may not have been the newest shiny object, but dammit, when you made a call, it went through, no matter how you held the phone. Being tightly integrated with the company intranet was a huge plus, something that android and ios still don't have completely. I miss being able to tap on a meeting organizer name in calendar to message him I'll be a little late.
I suspect that national outage awhile back started people thinking about single points of failure. I know that when BES went down for a week (not Blackberry's fault -- we outsourced our BB admins and that did not go well) most of us BB users had Android or IOS phones on order by the time it came back up. Blackberry ("Crackberry") got us hooked on instant gratification -- immediate access to office communication -- and when it went away, we were not prepared to take that cold turkey.
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I don't think it was one thing, but I agree that was a huge factor. It was the same thing that killed Danger (Sidekick) after the acquisition by Microsoft. Customers do not respond well to an extended outage. Blackberry can't run around claiming to be the best in IT while having an incident like this.
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Blackberry can't run around claiming to be the best in IT while having an incident like this.
Which is very odd. They're more reliable than, well, everyone else. Hell, they're more reliable than our electrical service!
The only reason that Great Outage (which didn't even impact most customers, and most of those were affected for less than a day) was even newsworthy was because BlackBerry's services are so incredibly reliable!
Compare that to Apple's month-long MobileMe outage, the uncountable outages afterward, the regular iCloud outages, and even their recent month-long developer center outage. Th
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In web services? Apple has a terrible reputation for web services. They have a great reputation for hardware reliability mainly because they are compared to bad desktops and Android phones. That being said, there is a
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BlackBerries not on BES conversely needed BIZ. The outage was devastating.
As I pointed out, the majority of their users were completely unaffected. Of those who were, most were out for less than a day. I should also point out, that many of those affected only experienced slowdowns.
iPhone works fine without Apple servers
The same was true for the Great BlackBerry Outage. The phone still functioned as a phone, as did apps. Messaging (Email and BBM) were really the only services significantly impacted, though every message was ultimately delivered. (The same can not be said for their competition.)
The infamous BlackBer
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I have a company-supplied Bold, and it is easily the worst phone I've ever touched. Its not reliable at ALL. It only syncs when it feels like it, reception is poor, and the battery life is so bad its never charged anyway. And for some reason, if the battery starts to go low, it just turns off the cellular modem but doesn't turn it back on when its put back on charge. Basically, if you keep one eye on it, it'll just stop getting emails.
The innovative ways that Blackberry devised to suck are impressive. The b
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um, yeah, you should have sent it back. I've had a Bold and a Tour, (two different carriers) and haven't had any of the experiences you describe. The desk holder is head and shoulders the best ever created. There's no connector to press in, as with both of my Droids -- you just drop the phone in the general direction of the slot and it switches to desktop mode and starts charging. No problems with reception or battery life, although I did invest in the extra capacity battery as a job requirement.
As you
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I'll respectfully disagree, as I think the shift had more to do with the fact for most users, everything changed at home.
For years, most people had a cheap candy bar / flip phone, or at most, an expensive candy bar / flip phone. All phones were pretty dumb and very similar. Remember the RAZR? It was The Thing for a while, but looking back, it wasn't really that much different from everything else.
The hardware was sexy, but the software was horrible. Nobody liked the OS, nobody thought the phones were respon
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You have some good points there, especially about the Blackberry tablet, which could have been good but ended up being... a toy. Blackberry did blow it in many, many ways.
My answer will take the form of a question. Isn't anyone else out there bored with a plethora of applications that consume idle time but don't actually enrich one's life? I'm finding that after a couple years playing with this neat little miniature touchscreen computer, I'm bored. I don't really use it, *really* use it, much except for
Forget the device -- buy the ECC patents! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure there is some value in the device, technology and related patents, but perhaps the greatest value is in the patents the own for ECC (Elliptical Curve Cryptography). Now that RSA's algorithm is on the way to being cracked, it's possible many will move to ECC -- and that means big money for Certicom, who is owned by...Blackberry. I know RSA will refute the patent claims and there is sure to be a war, but whoever owns Certicom has a big dog in the fight. The NSA has been pushing for ECC for almost a decade, so none of this is new news. However, it will be a factor in the level of interest for potential acquirers.
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RSA is not going to be cracked. And moreover if RSA could be fully cracked, i.e. prime factorization was a solved problem then ECC wouldn't hold up either. It is not difficult to map any ECC problem to a finite collection of factorizations on the integers.
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Crypto experts speaking at the Black Hat USA 2013 conference yesterday said there's a real -- though perhaps not overwhelming -- possibility that much of the Internet's encryption will soon become completely unraveled. This grand unveiling of secrets, they contended, could arrive within a handful of years. To avoid what they jokingly called a "Cyber Pompei," they strongly encouraged a switch from algorithms based on the Diffie-Hellman and RSA systems to elliptical curve cryptography.
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Hype. There's a VERY small chance that RSA could be cracked (that's in the article you linked). If RSA is cracked, the development in number theory is likely to have a LOT of repercussions. I suppose the recommended switching to ECC because it's the only other option.
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I'd like to here the original and not just a reporter's summary. But assuming this is accurate then In my read, dumb advice. If DLP is solved EC factoring is solved. The article has mistakes a perfect solution to DLP is a perfect solution to factoring. I could imagine that progress is made in DLP, something like a another million+ reduction in computation, which EC factoring is less susceptible to. But if the problem is solved and these papers aren't just about a speed up then game over.
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It doesn't matter if RSA is cracked or not, the DH-RSA mode of TLS with perfect forward secrecy has a 300% setup performance penalty vs. non PFS modes, while the 64-bit optimized version of ECC TLS PFS only has a 15% penalty. The former is a hard sell to sysadmins - the latter, not so much.
Somebody in the open source patent pool project (IBM, Google, Redhat, etc.) needs to come up with the cash or other incentives, perhaps as a group, for the future security of the Internet, which is a critical dependency
It's Canadian business culture (Score:2)
Even after years of failiures, RIM remains Canada's largest company that wasn't a national/regional bank or involved in sell off Canada's natural resources. Canada just doesn't have a business culture that allows for innovation or giving customers what they want.
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Nobody remembers Nortel huh? There seems to be a model here for Canadian Tech companies. At one point a few years ago Nortel could do no wrong, the same could be said for RIM (or now Blackberry). RIM lost ground because they held onto their old beliefs in the consumer market, that their products could do no wrong and that people would always expect and pay the Blackberry tax. I think what eroded that were devices that were sexier and had a wider selection of apps. Sure, the Corporate markets were big m
Blackerry has died on the vine (Score:2)
Is Apple the next Blackberry? (Score:1)
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Single most successful smartphone on the market with two other models in the top five. Earning more than 50% of the entire industry's profits. Nope. Apple is fine. The market is crowded and competitive but Apple has firmly grabbed a profitable portion of the market and, unlike RIM or Nokia, Apple isn't afraid to innovate and change direction when its necessary.
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You could have said the same thing about RIM in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010...
Apple is actually doing significantly less than RIM did when they were on top. If the beliefs about RIM have any truth to them, we should see Apple fall hard over the next few years.
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Apple makes more profit on iPhones than everyone else who makes smartphones put together. Not to mention Apple makes other things as well. They've got a ways to go before they "stall out."
Sell their killer app: Email / Calender / Contacts (Score:2)
RIM should package and sell their killer app: The integrated Email / Calender / Contacts system. IMO, it would change the face of productivity on android-based phones.
The BEST feature of my old BB was the seamless nature of accepting meeting (calender) requests via email, using contact information on the phone. This was just using my normal email provider, not a BES setup. Worked like a charm!
Then I added a BES email account, and that worked well also.
in Gmail (on the android), I can receive and accept ca
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I've had my Samsung android phone for a year or two now, and despite trying a boatload of different (free and paid) email apps, I've never seen one that can manage calender requests
What version of Android are you running? I haven't seen any issues like that with Android since 2.2. Granted the HTC mail client had issues with handling Exchange accounts properly through 2.3 (I dropped HTC and never made it to 4.0 with an HTC phone). Maybe the issue is Samsung's proprietary email client? Because I've been using the stock android mail client since 2.3 seamlessly with ActiveSync. The only downside I see is that you can only sync one calendar (the default calendar) but that is a limit of
Sinking ship.... (Score:2)
Much like WebOS, which I loved by the way, BB is now a sinking ship. I've played around with the BB10 and it's actually a pretty cool phone. The problem for me was that it was so different from Android and iOS, in term of the gestures and just how it flowed. You'd have to basically relearn, and unlearn, the whole smartphone ecosystem and I'm not a big enough BB fan to do that.
There just doesn't seem to be room for more than two big players in the smartphone arena. The only reason Microsoft is still in there
Go to India... (Score:2)
And I don't mean offshoring.
While RIM/Blackberry have been victims of trends in the West, that's not been the case in India, from what I have read. While in the US, people have abandoned the Blackberry for iPhone & Galaxy, in India, such trends don't suddenly disappear, unless there is a disaster in the market itself. So since the Blackberry had a 'coolness' factor to it at one time, particularly in the offices, it's stilll popular in India, where offices still standardize on them, instead of going
I think we need to ask this question: (Score:2)
I think we need to ask this question: Of the top 5 engineers you know, potentially including yourself, what would it take to get them to go to work for Blackberry? Discounting the top people you know who wouldn't want to leave their current employer, of the top 5 who have a willingness to move for the right offer, what would it take to get them to go to work for Blackberry?
The fish rots from the head, and of the people matching this description who I know, it would take interesting work, the ability to ma
Turn it into an Android vendor (Score:2)
Sell BlackBerry branded phones with Android inside. Good profits if the purchase price was low enough. Maybe sell the technology for 30 million or so. Much like Palm.
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Already have. It sucks.
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So the company that essentially made everyone want a smartphone (recall the crackberry) explores ways to die.
Something is wrong at the top of a company when they create a market then hand it to a rival without even a challenge.
Nonsense. It is healthy economics at work. There are lots of huge companies that no longer exist because their markets dried up, or because the competition became better at playing the game than them. Their business plan was to have an innovative product. Now, Apple and Samsung have larger research departments and get products on the market quicker than Blackberry. Better try to sell off whatever is left now than wait until the next wave of Chinese smart phone producers floods the market and kills them off
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> There are lots of huge companies that no longer exist because...
> the competition became better at playing the game than them.
Yup. Also known as "Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land."
Re:leadership (Score:5, Insightful)
So the company that essentially made everyone want a smartphone (recall the crackberry) explores ways to die.
Something is wrong at the top of a company when they create a market then hand it to a rival without even a challenge.
It's a more common problem than one might imagine: Massive success is certainly profitable; but it makes you conservative and risk-averse (you don't want some fancy skunkworks project, even your own, to cannibalize your cash cow, and your whiny customers want compatibility). It can also constrain your horizons: RIM effectively crushed all comers to the 'mobile email' market (WinMo's numbers were never pretty, even with MS pushing it, and Palm never really recovered after it became clear that PDAs would be network-connected, rather than intermittently docked, in the future); but barely even attempted, much less recognized as the looming future, cellphones-as-mostly-general-purpose-computers until 'email' had already become something that the competitor's markedly superior (as computers) phones could handle adequately by virtue of being a computer with an internet connection.
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So the company that essentially made everyone want a smartphone (recall the crackberry) explores ways to die.
The original "crackberries" didn't do voice. RIM made the front office types want sexy, e-mail capable pagers. They have always stumbled with the transition to general purpose smartphones.
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Not worth $5. Get out while you still can...
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Five percent ownership rule (Score:2)
Once you sell shares on the open market, the company is "For Sale"
By "for sale", you mean "subject to hostile takeover through accumulating a majority of shares." But once word of a potential takeover gets out, the stock price rises, which is why Comcast bought NBC-Universal in 2011 and not Disney in 2004 [slashdot.org]. And there's a bunch of red tape in certain jurisdictions before an entity can buy more than a certain percent of another corporation's shares. (In the US, for example, a 5 percent stake requires filing Schedule 13D or 13G with the SEC.) Besides, t
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Sorry, they sat on their hands thinking they were untouchable for far too long
Now ask yourself: What has Apple been doing for the past few years? What are they doing right now?