As Research in Motion works to recover from a year of hard knocks, media reports indicate that other technology heavyweights have been considering snapping up the struggling BlackBerry maker.
Reuters reported Tuesday that RIM wasn’t interested in merger talks with Amazon. Citing unnamed “people with knowledge of the situation,” the report said that the two companies were in casual talks over the summer, but Amazon never made a formal offer. It is unclear if pricing discussions ever took place, the report said.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft and Nokia also “flirted” with the idea of a joint offer for RIM, but only in informal discussions.
RIM shares fell to an eight-year low Tuesday — the best day for U.S. stocks this month, adding fuel to speculations that the company is ripe for a takeover.
The company has been struggling this quarter. Poor sales of its tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, have hurt its image and those troubles were compounded when its vaunted BlackBerry Messenger network suffered worldwide outages.
In RIM’s most recent earnings call, co-chief executives Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis said that they were open to looking at several options to help the company, such as licensing out its operating system. The executives also announced that the next BlackBerry system would be delayed until the second half of 2012. The Journal report indicates that Balslillie, who handles RIM’s corporate strategy, has said that he would like to wait on that launch before considering bids from buyers.
At this point I'd be shocked if RIM investors got anything back on their investment.
Balsillie will need to find another career path as his days in "corporate strategy" will not make it onto his résumé. RIM's shortsightedness and absolute absence of vision has already doomed the company while its competitors lick their chops waiting to snatch their customer database.
What, outside of the huge - but rapidly dwindling - install base do prospective suitors find interesting? Is it really worth the enormous expense to migrate those users off the rickety, overcentralized RIM system and onto their platform? Most CFO's would blanch at the sight of capital expenditures associated with any porting over of 60 million accounts - or would it just be cheaper to wean the CrackHeads off BBY's altogether?
I would LOVE to see what's cooking in the labs at MSFT & Nokia. I imagine there's a team hammering away at program(s) to redirect the devices from Waterloo to ActiveSync - I can catch the scent of reverse engineering in the air, what with RIM making a too-late charge in that direction.
The Amazon thing I don't get just yet - outside of having another huge client base to hawk their wares to, I don't see any integration with the Kindle. Besides, the Kindle is already cooler than the PlayBook (another doomed techno-goof courtesy Balsillie et al).
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