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BlackBerry Officially Open To Sale
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."
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.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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.
And build hardened Android phones for business. There, was that all that hard?
Maybe HP will buy them. It worked out so well for them last time.
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
Already have. It sucks.
They won't have any buyers if they treat the sale of the company the same way they treated the sale of their Playbook tablet: if you don't include the email service no one will want it.
The blackberry is the most counter-intuitive, unfriendly phone I've ever used. Its killer app is email, but being that it's a PHONE, functions like SMS/MMS, phone, and voice mail should be just as easy to use. No, instead the text messages disappear into a mess once you've read them, you have to dig through menus to access your voice mail number, and you accidentally dial people all the time because touching a phone entry, or pushing the nav button, or pushing the dial button all dial the phone. I have three different one-touch ways of dialing someone, but have to press three times to get to voice mail.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Microsoft is going to snap this company up in a hearbeat. IP, customers, tech, reputation, brand name. All things MS is hungry for in the mobile space.
Netcraft confirms it, Blackberry is dying
always short of resistors...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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.
We`re all equal
Proverbs 16:18: Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. This was BlackBerry's issue - they thought they were the king, and that they didn't need to listen to the market. "You don't need a camera. That's crazy talk", "Nobody will accept a touch keyboard", "No other devices will gain corporate acceptance", "Employers will always make the choice for employees" etc etc. It's been one long "we know what you want better than you do" at BlackBerry.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
They don't listen to their customers. They have two main groups of customers -- corporate/government and consumers. The former just wants a piece of equipment that is secured and efficient for communication; the latter group wants a device to do everything apple could do. Instead of producing two lines of products, they combine them in a half as--s product that couldn't do neither well. They had their chance. Hint hint: Steve, please listen. Corporate customers do not want your Windows 8.
I can offer up to $5, but there will be strings attached. Call me if interested.
AOL announces that Netscape is for sale. But you over there? You're fired.
It's surprising to me that geeks have missed the golden opportunity to drive home one consistent message: Western tech companies need to grow up and invest in hardware and stop saying it's too hard and expensive. Qualcomm's CEO earned a Ph.D. in EECS from Cal-Berkeley, and Qualcomm has bought ATI's Mobile Graphics division and developed its own ARM SoC. Apple bought Palo Alto Semiconductor and developed their own ARM SoC. Samsung spends billions on up-to-date fabs, has their own ARM SoC, and their own LTE baseband chipset. Apple and Samsung are basically stuck with each other partnering on financing next-generation fabs to stay even with Intel. Meanwhile all the struggling companies have in common they don't do hard hardware but have to buy it from someone else.
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.
I think the GP is correct - there is a huge potential for MS to leverage this company and get it on the cheap.
They could also merge product lines and somehow salvage Windows RT.
This could the one time where MS's old strategy of buy and conquer (or whatever the meme is here) could not only help themselves (as usual) but save a company (and some jobs) that was the innovator of its time.
I think the Blackberry guys have some more in them but just need a sugar daddy.
Yeah, it may be selling their "souls" to the "Devil" but then again, they are faced with obliteration.
-Just some AC's 2 cents
2 year contract required. Price includes $50 mail-in rebate via gift card.
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.
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
And you can't do that with iOS and Android devices? With side loading it is harder to control but I think the enterprise license from Apple allows you to do all of that. At $1000/yr with unlimited devices it is a reasonable cost.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
BYOD is already starting to see push back from IT in a serious way because companies are starting to realize that at the very least they need some sort of "enterprise Android" they can control. You want to bring some crappy $100 Android phone that'll never get updated into a big company? That's the height of stupidity. That's about as smart as letting your employees bring their virus-laden Windows boxes and probably barely ever patched Macs (most Mac users I know don't even know what version of OS X they're using!) and use them for official company business on site.
Another thing that very well may help BlackBerry recover is that BB10 and BES 10 just got ATOs from the Department of Defense and the DoD's public announcement about the iPhone more or less said the iPhone would be crippled and managed by BES 10 anyway.
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.
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.
You call what has happened to RIM/BB "tumbled"? No, I call that a death spiral. Sorry, they sat on their hands thinking they were untouchable for far too long and they're in absolute freefall. Short of a Herculean rescue effort, they're done.
Once you sell shares on the open market, the company is "For Sale"
All this announcement is that management won't run away in terror if someone walks up with a big bag of money.
Run away in terror means try to prevent them from buying the company from it's current owners.
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.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
There may be value in Blackberry's patents and cash on hand but otherwise the company isn't worth very much. And competitors don't buy dying companies - they just let them die and then buy whatever pieces they want in the resulting fire sale.
Qnx? What crap china OS is it? Rim? What crap reseller of crap china OS is it? Ino Qnx old. Ino Rim old. Sparse me the nominet.
Blackberry was the premiere phone product before the iPhone family. But there are signs Apple is stalling out now. Its a very competative market.
By returning money to shareholders so that they can reinvest the money in more viable companies.
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.
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 calender requests from other gmail accounts, but not from MS outlook, BB, or iPhone. I've dug all around about this, I've read craploads of comments about the same thing, and I've not seen anyone solve this. At BEST, I only get "workaround" suggestions, but the fact remains that RIM did it best.
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, and integrations between contact info in email and the calender, like my old Blackberry.
There is precedent here as well, with the "blackeberry connect" suite that's been around for a while now, installable on the old Nokia 9300 / 9500 (running symbian OS). Did they ever make this for android?
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 is because they have enough money to keep it afloat. The sales for Windows phones are dismal and not likely to improve much. Android and iOS just have too much momentum.
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. 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, this is different, as the news story appears to be about BlackBerry seeking a friendly takeover.
Do you /.ers think BlackBerry will sell for EQUAL TO or LESS than 1.00 USD ?
That's a tough one!! :-/
$2 is my bid--and a Jefferson $2 bill, at that!
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 Android (much less iPhone). And if India is gonna be the bulk of its market, they might as well join the likes of Indian phone makers like Karbonn & Micromaxx, and play there.
The company did get bad publicity from the few outages that they had, so they would do well to minimize on those.
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 ActiveSync itself.
I expected these comments to be littered with panacea and hyperbole... I was right
It's interesting that you all share the same mentality as the market, or so you say. Was it not long ago that Apple was being traded for whatever the amount of current assets they had at that given time?
Surely everyone will reply, well blackberry is no apple. I see no visionaries or wow-inspiring products. They are indubitably a sinking ship.
And so the short sellers went on their avaricious steeds to the slaughter and did what they could to behead the revenue. It lasted a while but then Blackberry, the knight that didn't play dead nicely, went to his dagger and took his life into his own hands, away from the sword that almost meant certain death.
The timid ran and caused a stir in the cynics,
philosophers went to their chairs and gossiped,
wealthy men sat on their credited thrones,
the general public scratched their heads.
They're all watching now,
waiting for death or a miracle to happen.
Yet the men who rode in strongly with such great vigor,
must now fight on the ground,
watch out for someone who really believes in Sir Berry,
For if someone swoops in to surprise us all,
to guide the wounded home,
the pride in him will be restored again,
sending away the evil men.
The stock might fall or grow again,
most of them do in the end.
Expect bad news and good articles too.
Sir Berry is tired of having his will questioned,
his armor tattered from the storm of abuse,
now he stands on the battlefield,
meticulously judging his value.
Oh all he needs is a savior,
but I only care about me.
The question is -
how long will I still have faith?
For I've already got his horse and mate.
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 make a difference to the company's bottom line, and the ability to get a product they'd worked on into the hands of millions of people and thereby make a difference in those people's lives.
I've asked some of them in both sets of 5, and, after they had stopped laughing, a few of them told me I had made their day. None of them felt that Blackberry embodied any of those requirements, or that Blackberry was even capable of embodying them at any point in the near future, even with drastic management changes. The general consensus is that it's going to be parted out, and that a patent troll will purchase Certicom in hopes that Elliptic Curve Cryptography becomes a big thing they can use to blackmail licenses out of companies.
Peace BlackBerry sells, but who's buying?
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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