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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.
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/
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
An article for each senator who supports SOPA, with the corresponding senate.gov link
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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.
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make install -not war
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 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...
Also, I wholeheartedly believe it's the wrong aproach. The US really needs a legal overhaul - SOPA, PIPA and CIPA should be approved, put them through and let people live under this regime for 3-4 months, then people will start to notice how truly wrong the world has become.
A single day of black out will make people think "oh, but it's not my fight really". Make it stick, force people to jump through hoops to get their youtube and lolcat fix; then action will be taken and it will be swift.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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