BlackBerry Abandons Sale Plans, Will Replace CEO 83
An anonymous reader writes "BlackBerry has abandoned plans to sell the company to Fairfax Holdings after the shareholder could not raise enough money. CEO Thorsten Heins is to leave the company. From the article: 'The company also said that Prem Watsa, chairman and CEO of Fairfax, will be appointed Lead Director and chair of the compensation, nomination and governance committee. Mr. Watsa had resigned from the BlackBerry board earlier this year to explore a bid for the company.'"
semicolon (Score:2, Informative)
semicolons are awesome! especially in headlines. The Onion does it well.
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Commas don't combine sentences unless followed by for, and, not, but, or, yet, or so. A semi-colon would be perfectly appropriate.
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Thinking about it more, I think a semicolon would be correct if it were a sentence, but a comma would be more commonly used in the headline context.
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Although the bby headline on the front page of nytimes uses a semicolon so what do I know.
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BlackBerry calls off sale, will replace CEO
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From high school English, there are 31 acceptable uses for a comma. Evil English teacher made us label every comma used in our writing assignments. I no longer have his list but found what appears to be an equivalent list here http://www.grammarly.com/handbook/punctuation/comma/ [grammarly.com]
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Unless you're in the third grade and also learned that "i before e unless after c" is the law,,, there are many other acceptable uses of a comma that don't follow you're rule.
Now tell us your thoughts on apostrophes!
Re:semicolon (Score:5, Funny)
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Of course they're only doing it because of a rumor that Apple is planning to replace Tim Gift with Siri.
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Judicious use of uppercase letters is good too.
Blackberry's back! (Score:1, Insightful)
Back on it's way to catch up to Windows phone sales! Then Apple and Android next. Everyone buy stock now now now!
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Never going to happen.
Oh really? What put "losers" like Circa-1986 Apple at the top of that mountain today?
Will humans ever fucking learn from history, or will we continue to be obscenely ignorant and stupid about using words like "never"?
Question abound from the peanut gallery watching the sheeple...
Re: Blackberry's back! (Score:1)
Apple had Steve Jobs. And he brought along some of the brightest minds with him from NeXT.
Within 3 month he killed of everything Apple did, replaced it with something new, gutted the products, implanted a very clear and focused vision and put the right people in charge.
BBRY has no one like him. Not even vaguely close. Not by a light year.
BB has no focus, no goal,, no vision, no direction to go.
That's the difference between Apple in the 90s and BBRY.
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The same could have been said about Apple circa 1986. "Apple has no focus, no goal,, no vision, no direction to go."
For all we know, in a few years we'll see the triumphant of the former co-CEO's as an important turning point. We'll watch Apple decline and say "Well, Apple doesn't have a Lazaridis. Not even vaguely close. Not by a light year."
Re: Blackberry's back! (Score:4, Funny)
Don't forget Apple had to get all the way down there first and Blackberry still has a ways to go down yet. For all the winners there are losers Epson ( and I ain't talking salt), Palm (no oil there now), Wang (gone all limp now), Gateway (to no where), Apricot (just not fruity enough), Commodore (no ship to sail), to name just a very few. Most crash very very few rebound.
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What about its'? Everybody forgets about its'
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What about its'? Everybody forgets about its'
I don't always use those three letters and punctuation together in one word, but when I do, I prefer 'tis.
Sure it is off-topic. But you have to admit that this is a far more interesting topic of discussion than the article. Blackberry. Yawn.
Blind and Stupid (Score:1)
Blackberry/RIM has been a truly classic example of the blind _and_ stupid leading the poor unfortunate employees who haven't jumped ship yet...
If they think putting themselves on the market and then pulling themselves from the market hasn't hurt their already brutalized image and reputation then they are truly clueless. Blackberry is dead. How much more good money are they going to throw down the toilet?...
Slashdot Abandons Grammar Will Use Runon Sentences (Score:5, Funny)
nt
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Dupe
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Maybe. They are pumping a billion dollars into the company. Less than the 2 to 3 billion the buyout would have pumped in but still a large amount.
Then thing about fight or flight.
Selling stock is like voting with your feet. That’s fleeing.
Buy the company and changing the management. That’s fighting. Not a choice for many small investors. The new management might have some brilliant ideas. Or maybe they will just shut down the company and sell the company in chunks. I understand it has a lot of
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"They are pumping a billion dollars into the company. Less than the 2 to 3 billion the buyout would have pumped in but still a large amount."
Apple made 10 billion in deferred profits last quarter. DEFERRED profits.
A billion is *not* enough.
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A billion is *not* enough.
To do what? Don’t leave me hanging. At this point we are comparing apples to berries.
On one hand we are talking about paid in capital. I will point out that Apple only has 20b (plus retain earnings).
On the other hand we are talking about 10b in profits for a large company that is involved in phones, tables, computers, software, etc. verse a medium sized focused company. That indicates that Apple is well run not that 1b could not be wisely spent. I will also point out that when Steve Jobs was hired on
FTFS vs. FTFA (Score:5, Informative)
Summary: "BlackBerry has abandoned plans to sell the company to Fairfax Holdings after the shareholder could not raise enough money."
Article: "In an interview, Mr. Watsa denied reports that Fairfax struggled to raise financing for the $4.7 billion deal. 'Over the history of Fairfax, we've never had a problem lining up financing,' he said. 'There was no question of us being able to raise money. After the due diligence period we didn't think was appropriate for [BlackBerry] to be burdened with debt.'"
Maybe the AC knows something it's not sharing?
Re:FTFS vs. FTFA (Score:4, Interesting)
IMO, Prem Watsa is just engineering the price of the stock down while freezing out other potential suitors with that "pays us 30cents/share if you sell to another" clause.
Friday BBRY was at $7.77. Watsa's offer *was* to buy it at $9.00. Today he says "he changed his mind" and then 9:30am, *someone* bought 2.5% of BBRY for $6.46. And tomorrow morning it will happen again. (just watch)
Watsa's Fairfax company is one of those predatory company that buys struggling companies, chops them up and sells the parts for more than the company was worth as a whole.
Mark my words: He will buy BBRY sooner or later and spin off BBM at a price that will cover the purchase price of BBRY as a whole.
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BBM isn't worth X billion. Not anymore. It was before iMessage became ubiquitous for a huge % of smart phone numbers, before WhatsApp became the new BBM, before Google Talk made SMS free for countless others. BBM isn't valuable, nobody is going to pay for the service, it isn't worth X billions in ad impressions.
The Trove (Score:2)
BBM isn't worth X billion. Not anymore.
Patents anyone?
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What patent is worth _billions_ for maybe 10 years remaining in force?
It's easy to extort a few million with some crap patent. But Billions? That kind of money makes it worth fighting.
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Any estimates from other than patent litigators?
4.5 billion with 10 years to run on a bunch of patents implies more then 450 million in net license fees/year.
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That's funny... WhatsApp is one of the primary spammers to fill my mailbox each day.
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iMessage became ubiquitous for a huge % of smart phone numbers
This is what delusion looks like!
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Blackberry started out as two or 3 special tricks.
1) it was by far the best way to get corporate email in your pocket. The keyboard was a part of this, easiest way to reply.
2) It also had BBM, which in certain places made it special for cutting down SMS costs (SMS has huge huge margins for carriers).
3) Less important, it had excellent battery life, meaning the older phones could go days without a charge.
Now, all of those specialties are gone.
1) EVERYbody does corporate email. Android and iOS have closed th
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Maybe the AC knows something it's not sharing?
More likely its that the AC OP has a reading comprehension issue. I have lost track of how many times someone submits an article here that says basically "not X" and the submitter starts screaming "They said X! They said X!". Since Fairfax is willingly buying some debt, I'm guessing that Fairfax is telling the truth that there was no financing problem.
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This is a great landscape for Blackberry. (Score:1)
With all the NSA stuff going around, Blackberry could market themselves as a phone with complete privacy for your texts. Make a few commercials with people using Android / Apple, and then cut to the NSA reading your text messages and laughing.
Re:This is a great landscape for Blackberry. (Score:4, Insightful)
this is the same company that let the indian and other asian governments have access to customers' data
Re:This is a great landscape for Blackberry. (Score:4, Insightful)
The truth has no place in marketing.
Re:This is a great landscape for Blackberry. (Score:4, Insightful)
this is the same company that let the indian and other asian governments have access to customers' data
This is the only company that fought (for years) to prevent such access. You only heard about it because they fought it. All the other companies complied. And the way they designed the BES not even they can grant India access to that data. But don't let facts get in the way of bashing a company that went to bat for your rights to privacy.
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hahahahaha.
bb is the original "cloud" messaging company.
Still circling the drain (Score:2)
Every time I hear news about Blackberry I hear that gurgling sound the loo makes when it gets a bit too full of water; not sure if it's slowly going down or slowly coming up.
Good news, bad news for BB (Score:5, Funny)
It looks like Fairfax wasn't able to come up with a DVD full of dollars ($4,700,372,992) to buy the company, but fortunately Blackberry was able to sell the CEO to an unnamed bidder for one billion.
(By the way, Thorsten? Just thought you should know. It's a cook book. Enjoy your trip.)
English (Score:2)
Random capitalization. No punctuation. 10 year olds could do better.
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BlackBerry Abandons Sale! Plans? Will, replace CEO!
Who's Will, Samzenpus? Under what authority can he replace the CEO?
Welcome to the farce! (Score:3)
RIMJobber1: What's that flushing sound?
RIMJobber2: Why's there swirly blue water all over the place?
RIM: RUH ROH RAGGY!
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It was more like companies abandon BlackBerry (Score:2)
Thorsten is out... (Score:1)
...but good luck finding another sucker willing to take his place. The USS Blackberry has been sinking for a long time now. Nothing and nobody is going to save it. Whoever takes the helm at this point will preside over the dissolution of the company, not its revival.
I think everyone in Canada... (Score:3)
Does anyone think they are still viable? (Score:2)
At this point, is anyone under the impression that BlackBerry has a viable business plan? It seems to me that their best option would be to liquidate; get what they can for BlackBerry's IP and the remnants of the BES service, and distribute the remaining cash to shareholders. The device business is a wounded and dying animal that at this point is just good money after bad.
There's nothing inherently wrong with BB X, but it was too little, too late, and doesn't present anything that iOS and Android couldn't
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And who spends not only money but huge amounts of valuable TIME developing a new OS and apps when a massively successful OS, and entire mobile software ecosystem, is immediately available to them for free?
Well, I don't blame them for trying (Score:2)
BB was never going to make it as Just Another Android Handset Maker if they had tried; that requires a very different corporate culture and organization from one that tries to create something very different.
If they had started (and finished) BB about two or three years earlier, it might have had a chance, but they spent too much time thinking iOS and Android were "consumer toys" and not worthy of their attention.
What a joke (Score:2)
Blackberries have always been a local feature. (Score:1)
Blackberries have always been a local feature to North America. If they really had been good then they would have sold well elsewhere too.
Apple did show how to make a touch-phone that sells, but now everyone else has caught up and Android is a lot more developer-friendly so there are more apps showing up there all the time. Blackberry and Windows Phone/Mobile/CE/Whatever are left behind and will have a hard time to catch up if they ever do. Phones today need not only to exist but also have a good and friend
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I mean seriously, why the fuck does the phone take 3 minutes to b