Nuked by both Apple and Android, RIM now finds itself too radioactive to even be bought. It’s a Hiroshima-like shadow of Wall Street, not capable of being touched.
Once worth $83 billion, the Waterloo, Ontario BlackBerry maker has slid to around $15 billion on the heels of a bruising loss to the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant which with iMessage stole RIM’s biggest draw. Even a 10 percent jump in RIM’s shares Tuesday was dismissed by Wall Street. “It’s a classic bounce off the bottom,” an analyst told Reuters.
Hoping to survive, RIM is slashing jobs, as well as production of its high-profile “PlayBook” tablet. The company now expects to ship 800,000 to 900,000 of the tablets during the second quarter, down from previously expected 2.4 million to 2.5 million, suppliers tell Taiwan-based industry publication DigiTimes.
However, in the midst of RIM’s attempts to correct a long series of mistakes and stumbles, there is talk of a potential takeover, with Microsoft and Dell being mentioned as rumored suitors. But would anyone want to take a chance on a company that can’t seem to shoot straight?
First RIM doesn’t foresee the rise of smartphones, then it doesn’t expand its offerings beyond email, then it mistakenly tried to compete with Apple for the consumer market – all the while company leaders rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Although yesterday’s upswing in RIM shares could be spun as renewed confidence in the company, the Wall Street action could also be the first signs of merger-and-acquisition sharks circling for a kill. Judging by past events, either way, it is not likely not to be good news for RIM.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
32 responses to “RIM Becoming Too Radioactive to Takeover”
um .. how can the “nuke(ing)” of RIM be attributed to iMessage which hasn’t even come out yet?
Another company swallowed up by an iPhone application. Is there no stopping the madness!? :D
Sold mine after just two weeks.. It is just tooooo noisy and unfreindly
I can see Dell trying, but for all the wrong reasons.
Dell will buy it lock, stock, and barrel, and then just let it continue to bleed money for 4 or 5 years with a series of programming chiefs, but nobody with a vision of what to actually do with it. Except keep yelling, “Me too!” at the market.
They see what HP got with Palm, and figure if their biggest rival did it, they should too. But all Dell has ever been is a supply chain manager. At one point Dell was probably the BEST supply chain manager, EVER. But everybody else figured out what they were doing, and they lost most of their competitive advantage. But Michael Dell still probably believes he runs a technology company, like HP, so he has to emulate/one-up them.
Well, realistically, it’s not iMessage alone, it’s a steady stream of missteps on RIM’s part. iMessage simply nullifies one of the Blackberry’s main advantages. The market recognizes this and has reacted accordingly. They don’t need to wait until iOS 5 hits the streets to know what will happen.
It’s sad really. I’d like to see RIM turn things around, but that is next to impossible with their current game plan and current twin CEOs. The fish stinks from the head down – in this case from the heads down.
I agree it sounds far fetched, but it was RIM’s last feature they could hold up and say, “at least we’ve got this.” And every feature Apple has released lately has taken off and been used by a majority of their users so this is probably going to take off as well and it will become known as an Apple feature as there will be something Apple will do to make it a step above RIM. And investors are looking out a few years for signs of sink or swim.
Not surprising considering how far RIM has fallen behind both in terms of hardware and the laughably archaic BB OS. Not only did the Storm take too long to come to market, but it performed terribly once it got into consumers’ hands. QNX should have been fast tracked and RIM should have been pumping out phones with high speed processors and more ram in order to run QNX, instead of releasing outdated products like the Torch on OS6 in freaking 2010.
I think this would be an interesting purchase for Microsoft. Up the specs on the hardware, keep the BB name, put WP7 with exchange support on a Bold with a hi res touchscreen, and they can conceivably win over many bidness folks just on the name recognition alone. They could also take some of the interfae concepts from QNX and apply it to WP7 and the tablet version of Windows. Dell could also just copy HP, and make QNX their very own WebOS.
no! It’s a #bloodbath
I feel bad for RIM, but oh well. That’s just how it is in the business world.
What people seem to ignore: RIM has never made any loss in 9 years and not even by now, they just had lower the estimated numbers – after rising every year in 9 years! So for the very first time it doesnt grow.
Its a great opportunity for other companies to get hold of the patents and technology. And RIM is highly profitable. But we will see.
But doesn’t RIM still have the advantage with less expensive handsets and far lower data usage as the iPhone? Their email and web traffic is compressed through their NOC.
This won’t be an advantage in every market but will in most underdeveloped foreign markets.
I wonder if NOC would be any value to the iCloud?
[That’ll start a firestorm of speculation]
Already said why Dell might – and would screw it up; Microsoft would also screw it up because 1) They’ve never successfully operated a data network (how’s that Hotmail account doin’?) and 2) they can’t even successfully develop existing MS software. How can they expect to adopt and update someone else’s out-of-date program?
But, yeah, one of them will probably try negotiating for it.
Hey, here’s one from left field (maybe even the parking lot): Bloomberg!
They’ve got lots of money PLUS the business bona fides to repackage the Blackberry with Bloomberg content. A few tailored packages for different industries, Bloomberg’s business credibility, and a bunch of (precarious) CrackBerry fanatics, and a little bottom-feeding bidding and it could be a really successful niche.
Hey, Apple piled up about $20B in cash just selling Macs to 4% of users before the iPod.
Here is the problem. Almost everyone replaces their smartphone every 2 years, at least here in the US. And with RIM saying that they won’t have a good iPhone competitor till last 2012, that puts them in a world of hurt. By the time they do release their OS/phone, people will have already moved to a different platform. The best thing they can do is throw in the towel, sell to Microsoft (since RIM’s clientele is mostly business-oriented) and have them integrate Exchange in their product. I know that there are old fogies out there who do NOT want a keyboard-less smartphone and the iPhone and Android phones are all going that way. They’ll just need to become a niche product.
Wow, that is from left field… but wait a minute, kind of brilliant. With enough proprietary content, exactly what BB can deliver, it could really work.
Second best goes to MS as a buyer with the exchange backend licensing.