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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.
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?
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.
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.
Maybe HP will buy them. It worked out so well for them last time.
Maybe they could have a bidding war with Yahoo... They've been moving aggressively into HP's "Where Technologies go to Die" turf lately, and a line of Yahoo! Mail branded blackberries would be perfect as a component of Yahoo's "Just think of us as a weighted average of Google and AOL" strategy.
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.
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.
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.