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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.
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.
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.
Yes that is hard. Many of BlackBerry's best features rely on BBOS or QNX. Android doesn't have them. It would be a massive porting effort. Android is often open source so once they finished porting they would have to share what they wrote with Samsung.
Given that BB10 already has compatibility with Android application, what does Android do for them?
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.
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.
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.
Nonsense. It is healthy economics at work. There are lots of huge companies that no longer exist because their markets dried up, or because the competition became better at playing the game than them. Their business plan was to have an innovative product. Now, Apple and Samsung have larger research departments and get products on the market quicker than Blackberry. Better try to sell off whatever is left now than wait until the next wave of Chinese smart phone producers floods the market and kills them off completely.
Remember that the task of the CEO and management of blackberry is primarily to satisfy its investors, not the employees. Continuation of the company is perhaps desirable, but not necessary.
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.
It's a more common problem than one might imagine: Massive success is certainly profitable; but it makes you conservative and risk-averse (you don't want some fancy skunkworks project, even your own, to cannibalize your cash cow, and your whiny customers want compatibility). It can also constrain your horizons: RIM effectively crushed all comers to the 'mobile email' market (WinMo's numbers were never pretty, even with MS pushing it, and Palm never really recovered after it became clear that PDAs would be network-connected, rather than intermittently docked, in the future); but barely even attempted, much less recognized as the looming future, cellphones-as-mostly-general-purpose-computers until 'email' had already become something that the competitor's markedly superior (as computers) phones could handle adequately by virtue of being a computer with an internet connection.
2 year contract required. Price includes $50 mail-in rebate via gift card.
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.
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.
In all fairness, BlackBerry made damn sure everyone knew that they had handed the keys over and created plenty of lead time so people in India could have alternative solutions. They handled this as responsible as they could have. That's not remotely similar to the USA situation with the telcos of secretly handing customer data over.
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.
As long as BB holds on, Microsoft has competition for the third place. In effect, unless BB completely disappears, it's balkanizing RT sales. By buying BB, if nothing else, it consolidates third place. From there, well, maybe it can take on Apple. I doubt it will ever really dent Android, which is too vast and on just about every price point for mobile devices.
It could do other things, like embed BES into Exchange, which has interesting possibilities. As awful as BES is to deal with, it has advantages over Activesync.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You said it yourself; QNX is a microkernel, while Linux is not. Go look up all the benefits of microkernels, and you'll have your answer.
A few quickies: The security can be absolutely impervious to attackers (see OpenVMS winning in every hackathon). The system can be mind-bogglingly stable, even if the drivers are crap and crash all the time (see OpenVMS at the top of every uptime chart). The system can run reliably, even with horribly faulty hardware... QNX was notable for running fine with just a few KBytes of reliable memory (perhaps ROM) while the rest of the RAM could be flaky as hell. QNX also has real-time features built-in that Linux can't touch, though more and more RTOS code keeps getting bolted-on to the Linux kernel.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
However, BlackBerry's BES (business) security was not affected. Each enterprise keeps its own keys, not BlackBerry. There was nothing to hand over to the government. The government would have to go to each business individually and demand the keys.
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.
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.
Blackberries on Rogers and Telus in Canada do the same, press and hold 1 to dial voicemail.
K Man
Apple makes more profit on iPhones than everyone else who makes smartphones put together. Not to mention Apple makes other things as well. They've got a ways to go before they "stall out."
> There are lots of huge companies that no longer exist because...
> the competition became better at playing the game than them.
Yup. Also known as "Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land."
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