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."

Comments

Old news is old

[MrHanky]

Old news is even denied by Samsung.

Re:Old news is old

[A Big Gnu Thrush]

SOPA blackout would have saved Soulskill some embarrassment.

Re:Old news is old

[Anonymous Coward]

He would probably post it tomorrow anyway.

According to Slashdot's dupe policy, he is obligated to.

Re:Old news is old

[deniable]

So, it's a pump-n-dump RIM job.

Um, rim shot.

Too late.

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Re:Too late.

[Phil06]

RIM should try HP, they're suckers for stuff like this

Is it still possible?

[neokushan]

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.

An even better plan:

[Mateo_LeFou]

An article for each senator who supports SOPA, with the corresponding senate.gov link

I don't understand what went wrong

[billcarson]

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.

Re:I don't understand what went wrong

[psergiu]

They failed at: reliability, uptime and ease of use
Real life example:
- Today i just missed a rescheduled meeting because my BlackBerry failed to ring the alarm (usually happens after too many days with no reboot);
- Had about 4 half-day to full-day outages in the last month;
- BES server upgrade caused ~15% of the Blackberry users in my department to lose access for around 3 days and then they had to reformat their devices to be able to receive mail again.

Re:I don't understand what went wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

(Posting AC because I'm at work)

I don't see at what point Blackberry failed?

What? Really? I can tell you the exact moment their downfall began. It's when the iPhone was announced and they decided they didn't have to adapt. Every other major phone maker quickly shifted gears, to one degree or another, except RIM. And RIM has been failing ever since. It's only recently that the downward fall has accelerated to this staggering degree but it all began the instant the iPhone was announced.

Re:I don't understand what went wrong

[Bert64]

They were revolutionary in their day, but now everyone offers email on their phones...

They failed to move with the times, so now while they still offer the same features everyone else offers something more and RIM devices are now perceived as dated and boring.

Their products are tied to Microsoft (BES requires windows and is primarily tied to exchange), who released a competitor in the form of activesync and bundle it for free with exchange, rim cannot possibly be cheaper because if you have everything you need to run a blackberry server you also have activesync, and likely also have an MS sales rep in your ear.

They try to lock you in to their products (you need a blackberry server, a blackberry handset and a blackberry specific data plan), but aren't big enough to get away with this strategy... Even MS Activesync is more open, there are multiple implementations on both the client and server end, and they work with standard carrier data plans.

They route traffic through their servers, creating an additional single point of failure. With a standard data plan the traffic is routed by the telco to your server via the Internet... With RIM the data is routed by the telco to rim via the internet, who they route it back to you via the internet... If RIM has an outage (and they have had several recently) then you are dead in the water... If your internet connection or telco suffers an outage you have the ability to change provider with minimal fuss, if RIM has an outage you have to migrate away from blackberry to another manufacturer which means changing your server infrastructure and replacing handsets.

The non enterprise (ie consumer oriented) blackberry service is intentionally crippled.

It is becoming more common for employees to provide their own phones rather than using company supplied ones, not many people want to buy a blackberry for their own use (partly due to the crippled consumer level service).

Re:I don't understand what went wrong

[Zerbey]

They failed because they refused to innovate, expecting that they would continue on customer loyalty alone. It hasn't happened.

Re:I don't understand what went wrong

[ckaminski]

The EPIC FAIL that was the Storm. That's the moment of failure. That they COULD turn the ship mid-course. But they turned it TOWARDS the whirlpool, not towards the beach with bikini-clad volleyball players.

Sad.

Re:I don't understand what went wrong

[nine-times]

Yup. I do IT support, and we support blackberries, iPhones, Android phones, etc. From my point of view, here's the breakdown:

Blackberry: People tell us they buy them because they're super-reliable business phones with lots of security features, but no one uses those security features and we get constant complaints about devices crashing, email not sending, and email not downloading. It's a headache to troubleshoot because of the weirdness of the setup-- resending service books, deactivating/reactivating phones is a hassle. Then every once in a while, every Blackberry in the world stops working because RIM essentially engineered a single point of failure for no apparent reason.

Android: Generally hard to support because there are so many models and they might be very different. How do you set up [x] on phone [y]? I don't know. I have to look it up because who knows which version of Android is installed or what UI customizations the manufacturer put on top of them? Most likely, I won't find good online instructions, so I'll need to get the phone in my hands and fiddle with it myself before I can say how to do anything with it. Other than that, they're kind of mostly fine. Some are good, but some are crap.

iPhone: If you don't have a specific reason to get a different kind of smartphone, just get an iPhone. They work. They're stable. There's a lot of development for the platform, and lots of things are well supported. I get very few complaints that aren't something obscure (e.g. why can't I sync Exchange public folders to my iPhone?), and most people are ultimately happy with them, even when they didn't think they would be ahead of time. I can tell you how to set up your email on an iPhone without looking it up, because it's the same on every iPhone and iPad. Email doesn't mysteriously stop syncing-- if it stopped syncing, you probably don't have reception or a Wifi connection. It's almost that simple.

Re:I don't understand what went wrong

[nine-times]

Not all Android phones even have the same physical buttons along the bottom of the screen, and they're in different order sometimes. The procedure that you have to use to get to a list of applications can be different from one phone to another. Older Androids didn't even have Exchange support, though there's a generation of Android models where the manufacturer added in Exchange support before Google did, which I believe also leads to other possible variations in options.

Now I'm not saying it's bad, but it's not all simple and uniform. A lot of people I support aren't that tech savvy, and I need to give them instructions that are exact, i.e. "Press this button, scroll down halfway through the page until you see something labelled [whatever]. The third option on the next menu will be [whatever]..." If the placement in the list is different or the label is different, you may as well be speaking German.

And I don't say this because I'm intimately familiar with every model of Android, but I've had the experience of looking at an Android phone and saying, "OK, click this button, scroll down and look for an option that says [whatever]," and having the person on the other end go, "There is no option called [whatever]." Because they had a different model and the settings had been reorganized someplace else.

sic transit gloria mundi

[mapkinase]

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.

Re:sic transit gloria mundi

[Swampash]

Dunno if I'd include NeXT in that list. It was bought out by a bigger richer company that wanted its technology and IP, and I'm posting using that technology right now.

Re:sic transit gloria mundi

[mapkinase]

You are missing the point. I am using the energy and aminoacids from the Shith kebob I ate this morning. It does not make the chicken successful.

Re:Raising Awareness?

[Splab]

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.

Re:APPLE should buy RIM

[MachineShedFred]

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's choice of stories is puzzling

[walterbyrd]

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.

RIM is already dead

[Casca]

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.

it's a trap

[Hognoxious]

[activate foil hat] But that's exactly what they would say, isn't it?