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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.
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.