Slashdot Mirror
Research In Motion To Be Sold, Possibly To Samsung
New submitter ve6ay writes "The talk of the tech world over the past day is that RIM, struggling mightily in these last months, was in talks to be bought either partially or wholly by Samsung. Sources at the Boy Genius Report indicate that while RIM may be trying to sell, it is asking way too much for itself."
Old news is even denied by Samsung.
Was a rumor and nothing more. This has been debunked by samsung.
This rumor has already been dashed:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/top-business-stories/which-idiots-bought-rim-shares-on-one-shaky-rumour/article2306353/
And to think, it was not too long ago that a Blackberry was "the phone to own".
I don't think this rumour of samsung buying out RIM is true, but it's worth noting that RIM's share price took a dive when Samsung denied it, theoretically that could have been a clever move by the big S to make the purchase cheaper.
Frankly, though, I don't think RIM has anything of value to offer Samsung.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Seems like it should go without saying..
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
An article for each senator who supports SOPA, with the corresponding senate.gov link
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
But maybe Nokia and RIM could both salvage something if they merged. Not that Jim & Mike can grasp the reality in front of them.
Baseless self confidence kills more people each year than bathtubs.
This company has seen more than its fair share of dismal performances. Can RIM RIP atleast now?
You'd need to move the primary DNS servers outside the US, too, because that's where they're going to start blocking.
If I were the US president, I wouldn't want my Blackberry to be at the mercy of a South Korean corporation. It's risky enough for a Canadian corp to be running such a sensitive device, but if it's going to be foreign (and so not entirely subject to US laws, and obviously having a national interest that sometimes competes with America's), Canadian is about the least risky. Especially after decades of integration with sensitive US operations, including the space arm on the NASA shuttles. But South Korea is not nearly as reliable, given its understandably different national interests and lower integration with US law. Not to mention the higher stakes in S. Korea with its insane nuke-armed neighbor changing kings and looking for new terms in their permanent war backed by the US.
In any case President Me would rather have an Android phone, with an OS my spooks could inspect with a fine toothed comb, than a closed OS - whether foreign made or not. I wouldn't want Steve Jobs' ghost having secret access to my top-secret iPhone messages, especially when there are so many laws and lawsuits Apple could use my help "fixing". Even just tracking my location through a commercial datacenter seems a breach of national security.
The US has such a large military, and budget to match, that I'd expect the White House to come with our own government smartphones on a secure network. There's no reason my phone couldn't use a gateway device carried by my entourage that goes over a secure military satellite network, even if the gateway is too big for me to carry myself. I don't carry the nuke football, either. But I could carry a civilian smartphone, battery out, in case I was separated from my entourage and as a last resort had to make a call on a public network.
--
make install -not war
Right, 'cause the Chinese people don't have any problem accessing servers blocked by the government, do they?
Sorry, the "best thing to do" is pass laws guaranteeing freedom on the net, instead of blocking freedom. While simultaneously working on a network of anonymous encrypting proxies, I guess. Content owners do have right to implement technical measures to protect their property rights, but in the absence of government intervention, I believe the freetards can implement technical measures guaranteeing freedom of speech at a much faster rate.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The whole slew of articles depends on inference, rumors, and anonymous sources. Par for the course.
The most ignorant moment, however, comes in the itworld article, when they claim that stock movements are giving credence to the rumors: RIM went up by 6.7%.
That's what happens for rumors, even crazy ones: stock prices go up. Credible rumors, however, would produce more action than that. Actual plans in the works, actual offers on the table, would create much, much more: the same article talks about Yahoo! rejecting $31 dollars a share at a time when they were valued at ~$19. RIM couldn't expect anywhere near the same premium, but nevertheless buyouts frequently come with some gravy, and a credible rumor could easily prompt the pure speculators, and even many sane investors, to push the stock up 20% or more. RIM went up a lousy 6.7%.
In other words, this isn't a credible rumor and even most speculators aren't seriously believing this talk yet. Call us when the stock goes up 15% or more, not to mention when you get a source with an actual name or some details.
I don't see at what point Blackberry failed? They started out as a messenger aimed at the corporate world, with reliability, uptime and ease of use as their selling points. They still offer that. The business world still has a need for this type of communication. What went wrong? I think it is a pity to see a motivated company like this go down.
RIM joins a long range of former tech prom queens and class presidents that did not make it:
Palm, altavista, NeXT, digg, motorola, SGI, Sun, Spice Girls.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The purpose of the blackout is raise awareness for the SOPA/PIPA issue among the general public who use websites like Wikipedia and Google but due to a lack of coverage in the mainstream press haven't heard much about the proposed legislation. I doubt any reader of Slashdot isn't already keenly aware of this issue.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
there might be a recruitment company cold calling for RIM jobs.
The Chinese people are generally dissuaded
Contents owners do have the right to implement technical measures to protect their property rights, but only to extent it is legal (Sony root kit), and why do they want the right to shut down an entire domain, not hosted in the USA, for infringing *Civil* laws that might not even apply in the country where the server is hosted ...?
i.e. why should I in one country, be prevented in accessing a server in another country, that hosts files that are legal to distribute in both, by a company in third country who has no jurisdiction in either country ...?!
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
The SOPA subject came on several occasions, and was discussed copiously here on /..
Adding another SOPA story would do better than a blackout.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
No, removing posts is DMCA. SOPA would nuke the domain. Get your stupid laws straight.
I stand corrected. Sweet. If no senators support it what are we worried about? It can't become law without passing the Senate, per my hazy recollections of schoolhouse Rock.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
While their proprietary data method generally sucks, it's not always a ripoff... In particular, their data roaming charges tend to be lower than standard data plans.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I would assume you are buying the patent portfolio and some engineering talent and ditching the rest.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
It would be bad for both companies. Apple has repeatedly said that they don't care about the enterprise. The only thing that Apple would want is the patents.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I recently bought a PlayBook for $199 and gave it a try. I liked it, but it didn't feel polished. Recently I downloaded and installed the PlayBook OS 2.0 beta and think it feels much more polished. The browser performance is also much better. Now I really like the PlayBook -- even more than my iPad. I especially prefer the form factor. Sure there aren't as many apps for the Playbook, but most apps on iPad are games and duplication. I don't care for games. As long as the apps you need are available on the PlayBook then that is good enough. BlackBerry bridge probably satisfied the email / calendaring needs of users who already own a BlackBerry smartphone, and 2.0 OS will ship with a stand alone email / calendaring application.
BlackBerry has many loyal fans and a large international market that is helping to fund their operation until BB10 comes out on smartphones (same as PlayBook 2.0 OS). I suspect once BB10 is available on smartphones, BlackBerry fans will have a reason to stay or come back. While I was having my hair cut I overheard a guy talking about his new iPhone and how he regrets switching from BlackBerry. Another guy said he spent so much time learning BB, he doesn't want to have to re-learn everything on iPhone (he must be afraid of technology.) My point is, there are people who actually prefer BlackBerry for whatever reason, no matter what you say to them.
There could be a money making opportunity here. Everyone in North America is pessimistic about PlayBook and RIM. Write some apps for PlayBook, then when BB10 comes out and BlackBerry fans come back / buy PlayBooks, they will go in the app store and will find only your apps. Of course I'm exaggerating (there are many other apps, but not as many as iPad/Android), but you get the point.
FYI I am an iPhone user and Android fan. I also have a BlackBerry Bold 9900 from work, and I don't like it. My recent experience with PlayBook changed my opinion of RIM and their future.
Patents maybe, the technology probably isn't worth much...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
And corporate customers too.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
Any issue that has the ACLU, MoveOn, and the Tea Party Patriots shoulder to shoulder should definitely be paid attention to, and recognized as a universally bad idea.
If those three organizations can get together on it, surely the rest of us can too?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"dwarfed by its two superior competitors" Apple and Google. I'll give it to Apple because they actually build products but Google? How much does it matter how large they are they don't make the devices and it isn't either of those companies' only product so it isn't like they are dedicated to the market and that they wouldn't just pump their money elsewhere if it didn't work out.
As someone who works with mobility products in Fortune-50 business, I can tell you that Apple cares quite deeply for the enterprise. They just have a starting point of a consumer device, but with every software release it adds more and more of what enterprise wants. They are asking, enterprise is answering, and Apple is changing their stuff to suit.
RIM is not, and that's why RIM is dying.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The MSM owners control this story. The only thing wrong with RIM is lack of MSM funding.
RIM may not have a future as an independent company, but they should still be able to fetch a good price. They've got a nice fat patent portfolio, and likely also a nice portfolio of enterprise customers that are too locked-in to be switching from BB anytime soon.
There have been some real news stories, but slashdot won't publish those. Instead slashdot posts stories about rumors - even rumors that have been proved false.
Can't wait for the next TechGuy Google smear rumor to be published on slashdot.
This is the problem everyone has:
" but only to extent it is legal"
'Legal' is getting more ridiculous every year. cf copyright.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I'm sorry but what is RIM not changing? Just about everything? Hardware? Check. Software? Check.
RIM already has the enterprise market, and it is the most feature-rich mobile enterprise solution. Apple is inching to get there, but they are still a ways off.
While Apple is inching into enterprise, RIM is inching into consumer. They started at different positions, but attempting to cover both segments. Having said that, RIM will always be enterprise at heart, and apple will always be consumer at heart. Apple isn't known to be a particularly enterprise-oriented solutions provider.
[this coming from an iPhone user]
P.S. Ironically, perhaps Apple could fix their iPhone to be more consumer friendly by introducing such basic features as ringer profile management. And when it eventually does build it into the OS, not hail it as the greatest Cupertino invention for a smart phone, but humbly acknowledge its absence as a brain fart.
They just don't know it yet. I have their latest and greatest 9860 (because I don't have a choice - thanks corporate idiots), and it is a complete and utter piece of shit. The first phone bricked itself within the first week, common problem with this model. The screen is plastic, and feels like it. The touchscreen is horribly inaccurate, making typing on it something dreadful and to be avoided. The on/off button is the entire top of the phone, so when you slip it in a pocket, it is very likely to turn the screen on. It is so under-powered, I'm constantly playing the guessing game of "did I tap the dialog box or not". The "app store" looks like the bargain bin at Blockbuster. Every time I pick this phone up it pisses me off.
Casca
No, removing posts is DMCA. SOPA would nuke the domain. Get your stupid laws straight.
No, SOPA would nuke the domain, then take the hosting companys servers, then dissolve the company, then go to the owners's houses and kick their puppies.
Wait, what were we talking about?
Rather I would like to see Apple invest in RIM with the understanding that RIM would exclusively build an App for iOS that seamlessly integrates into the RIM proprietary infrastructure. This would have positive effects for both companies. Apple would be able to sell to enterprise using tools that are already familiar, and RIM would have a funding source to cover the substantial fixed costs associated with it's infrastructure. I think there is value to RIM as an independent agent. RIM only needs to expand it's image as primarily a handset manufacturer. It is beyond that. It provide enterprise solutions.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
some people have more than one thing to remember, and for about 2 million years humanity had to worry about eating and taking a shit, and not much else unless there was a war
A better phrasing would be. Apple doesnt focus on the enterprise anymore then they do the general consumer. One ring to rule them all, as it were.
Good-bye
That is probably a good solution. I do know that RIM is working on a multi-platform server to manage BB, iOS, Android and Windows devices. I'm not sure how long until they release it though.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I believe RIM is a formerly amazing company suffering from an advanced and fatal case of MBA.
I always heard that RIM was serious in to business culture. When the company does implode, I bet we'll find that the entire organization was pretty much completely comprised of various levels of middle managers and executives, with very few people getting actual work done.
RIM's products have severely stagnated and their new OS efforts are pretty much going nowhere. Worse, they can't even seem to port their core messaging functions their new QNX based platform.
I think that somewhere they fired the core of their technical employees and knowledge workers. I think they've lost too many key assets, and now they're stuck rehashing and re skinning old software on crappy hardware because no one can make it work and some army of bean counters won't pay for serious hardware development. Something is very very rotten in RIM development land.
I would not be surprised to find that the a lot of the blackberry core messaging functions are implemented in a mysterious binary blob that nobody has the source for anymore.. And that their efforts to implement an emulator/API that works with their new QNX platform have so far failed.That's the only excuse I can imagine for the level of crap coming out of RIM lately.
Yes, and we could also manage everything according to our internal clocks instead of relying on those mechanical and digital clocks. But why?
As someone who works with mobility products in Fortune-50 business, I can tell you that Apple cares quite deeply for the enterprise. They just have a starting point of a consumer device, but with every software release it adds more and more of what enterprise wants. They are asking, enterprise is answering, and Apple is changing their stuff to suit.
RIM is not, and that's why RIM is dying.
Is that why Apple stopped selling server hardware? Is that why they don't have anything that can possibly compete with Active Directory?
Please, Apple's goal is to push their consumer products into the enterprise by using their customers to demand use in business and not providing any tools to manage them. It's been 5 years since the release of the original iPhone. Where's the management tools? Apple simply doesn't care because they don't need to care. They are focused on selling consumer devices that just happen to be used in business. It's actually quite genius - sell the shit out of the consumer product while not really providing support for the enterprise.
Don't get me wrong - the iPhone is a great device. But I'm tired of everyone acting like it did something new that wasn't available before.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I'm even more pissed off. I've never even been USA, how am I supposed to write to some congressman/senator? They should have at least limited the blackout to USA IP ranges but now every time I go to wikipedia I have to press escape before the page finishes loading.
Why compete with AD when you can just extend the de facto standard with the attributes you need? Apple published a white paper on exactly how to do that: http://www.inspirednetworks.ca/site/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Modifying_the_Active_Directory_Schema.pdf
No one was buying Apple server hardware except for very few niche markets, and Apple likes being a company that actually makes money on products. Strange, I know, but that's where it is. There were rare places where an Xserve made sense, and they were brilliant in those places, but the fact remains that you can run tens of thousands of Macs without having a single install of Mac OS X Server in your environment. This is something that should be celebrated, rather than used to deride. It's the opposite of vendor lock-in.
Re: iOS management tools - Because the world clearly needs even more MDM choices that all do exactly the same thing (what the APIs allow). AirWatch, Good, Motorola MSP, Altiris CMS, FileWave, JAMF, etc. aren't nearly enough. Apple publishes an MDM API (Just like Android, BTW), and lets MDM vendors fight it out for superiority (Just like Google, BTW). If you're a small business that doesn't want to pay for a full-blown MDM, you can get a Mac Mini server and turn on the profile manager service if you want an Apple-provided solution.
However, enterprise doesn't want an Apple-provided solution for MDM, because they want to manage ALL of their mobile devices from one console - BlackBerry, Android, iOS, WinMo (Yes, it's still out there), WP7, etc. The days of using 18 consoles for 18 different device platforms are over - the world has better tools now.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
[activate foil hat] But that's exactly what they would say, isn't it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
some people have more than one thing to remember, and for about 2 million years humanity had to worry about eating and taking a shit
And bears. You forgot the bears.
#DeleteChrome
Because when no one had digital clocks, people did not stay up so late thinking that their clock will get them awake. Everyone was up at sunrise because they went to sleep shortly after nightfall (no later than 10PM). They only scheduled meetings for reasonable times when everyone would be awake, like 10AM.
Born to Play
The front page of today's Calgary Herald business section suggests the rumors are not true, Samsung is not interested in RIM:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Samsung+interested/6012112/story.html
Well? Do bears shit in the woods? j/k
Life is not for the lazy.
And even that is too much to offer.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So much is wrong here...
PIPA is an alternative bill in the Senate, not the corresponding bill to SOPA. For SOPA to become law, it has to be passed by both houses (same thing for PIPA.)
If one house passes SOPA and one house passes PIPA, and neither house passes the bill passed by the other house, than neither becomes law (or even goes to the President for signature or veto.)
Wrong. They do get to vote on House bills, but only get to do so after the House has passed them. That's how federal laws get made: one house of Congress passes a bill, it goes to the other house, who passes it and sends it to the President, who signs it (or vetoes it, and then has the veto overridden in both houses.)
A "House bill" or "Senate bill" is just a way of describing where a bill originates. Certain bills (e.g., revenue measures) can only be House bills, but they still need to pass both the House and Senate before they go to the President. If the Senate didn't get to vote on House bills, no revenue measure would ever become law.
Frankly, though, I don't think RIM has anything of value to offer Samsung.
Well, except for the prospect of offering "RIM jobs" to attract new engineers, no, it doesn't.
Tee hee hee! You're a regular comedy god, repeating the same damn stopped-being-funny-long-ago-due-to-overuse joke that appears about RIM in every thread about them.
And then for good measure you repeated the exact same damn joke later in the same thread so that we could split our sides again just after we'd finished wiping the tears of laughter from our faces from last time.
Software is killing RIM. The hardware is not the problem.
I remember too reading on /. that a good portion of their sales are also in Government - particularly military because of all the security and maybe certification it received. So there was talk about the Playbook getting huge orders from the US military. I don't think those ever materialized.
The Playbook has been a failure. The hardware is awesome (I own one) but the software/OS sucks. I'm hoping 2.0 comes out soon so I can just install Android apps on it.
As for the BB, I would agree with many other comments. They aren't adapting to market needs for consumer or enterprise. I had one 3 years ago. Happy enough with it. Then I got one of the 9500 series. I feel like bricking it and throwing it away. I'm waiting for my contract to end. There's way too many simple bugs in the OS/apps that they probably won't ever bother to fix.
RIM "security" is highly overrated. Sure, it was great when e-mail on a phone was a pretty cool (and rare) feature, but now you can get all that security without relying on RIM to keep your secrets just by setting up a VPN server on your LAN.
Now, getting RIM to let iMessage and BBM interact is worth something, but probably not 12 billion dollars.
All this company has to do is OUTPUT a product they already have in production. I know stuff isnt done overnight but just cut the BS from the projects and ship already. It's painful to watch the decisions of RIM, they have such an iconic name and really nice hardware, just friggin ship OS updates like mad. build interest again. sheesh.. painful...
The rim card is not use now a days. There are many problem to use rim card for this reason this are banding. On the other hand sim card is more easier . uswebauthority
If you can't remember the times and dates for important meetings then you're either senile or you've got learning difficulties.
Ignoring the fact the the original article is old and bs anyway....
Nokia and RIM have nothing to offer each other at the moment. Nokia will probably build up slow and steady based on enterprise services that are part of Windows Phone 7 and also because of tight integration with Windows 8. But Nokia's greatest struggle at the moment is not tech... the tech is good. It is the fact that Nokia is "The Granny Phone". The biggest problem with that are people like my mother who bought and iPod Touch and can't use it because she has nasty dragon lady nails and she can't grasp the concept of using a touch screen with her fingers. She's the only person I know who would be better off with a resistive touch screen. The point being that the granny phone company is moving to technology too complex for granny.
RIM is the "We used to be the messaging phone company and now everyone else does that better than us and we just got left behind" company. It's truly amazing how a company who had such a "cool status" turned into a "wow... you still use Blackberry?... you must really be nostalgic huh?" kind of company. Having lived in Europe all thee years, I have to say I have never seen a BlackBerry phone up close. There is one store downtown who sells them, but they also sell everything else. So I pretty much have only heard of them. Same goes for Nokia Smart Phones in recent years.
If you go to a restaurant downtown in Oslo here, you should be cautious to have an identifying case on it. When you walk through the restaurant, people tend to have their phones on the tables and 3 out of 5 phones are iPhone 4s. Then you have the "don't care who makes it" feature phones. And then you have an occasional android phone. The fact that Nokia can't even sell their phones in a country where it used to be 100% Nokia dominated with an oddball Ericsson phone here and there, is pretty sad.
I think I might stop by one of the last Nokia shops in town and see what the new phones look like. I love Windows 8 and MetroUI. I am running it on two of the machines on my desk as I type this. My laptop and my tablet. But I think it would annoy me on my phone.
its called a fucking reminder, not all of us watch every second on the clock 24/7, a little ding to remind you to go to the meeting when your head is down hard at work is nice
but I guess your some form of superhuman that knows everything at all times...
Hi Like your post. When you get 5 why not go over to my Business Telecom website www.connectingeurope.net I would really appreciate your comments. Thanks! Iain from ConnectingEurope.net