[allisos]

20% market share would be a huge success.....

I'll have good and bad memories of Blackberry just like most. While watching business news channel today, one of the segments was about Blackberry being in dire straits. Basically it boiled down to Blackberry 10 along with the new devices, just didn't do enough of the trick in order to win people back. Boiled down to something like out of ten people buying a smartphone, eight will either buy iPhone or one running Android and two will buy Blackberry.

It's good to have fans and a site like Crackberry pushing and cheering Blackberry on but we all have to be realists. At the end of the day business is business and no matter if you thought Blackberry 10 was the best OS, it just wasn't enough to allow Blackberry to compete.

I think the truth is, outside of a small number of Blackberry loyalists Blackberry with its new devices and OS did not do enough in order to make the general public leave iPhone or Android.

[bcolton]

I'll have good and bad memories of Blackberry just like most. While watching business news channel today, one of the segments was about Blackberry being in dire straits. Basically it boiled down to Blackberry 10 along with the new devices, just didn't do enough of the trick in order to win people back. Boiled down to something like out of ten people buying a smartphone, eight will either buy iPhone or one running Android and two will buy Blackberry.

It's good to have fans and a site like Crackberry pushing and cheering Blackberry on but we all have to be realists. At the end of the day business is business and no matter if you thought Blackberry 10 was the best OS, it just wasn't enough to allow Blackberry to compete.

I think the truth is, outside of a small number of Blackberry loyalists Blackberry with its new devices and OS did not do enough in order to make the general public leave iPhone or Android.

That's more like 1 or 2 out of a 100. Not 10. And 3 to 4 would buy windows phone and the rest iOS or Android.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using Tapatalk 4

[BigBadWulf]

[Robin Lim]

The announcement made by BlackBerry that it is looking for other strategic alternatives was made for investors/stockholders. It appeased them with the knowledge that there is a Plan B. The word sale being the one that stock holders are most happy to hear.

The bad part is the it puts BlackBerry 10 operating system and devices "up in the air". I think people would be less likely to buy one now and developers would be less likely to support the platform.

Those not yet invested in the platform will take a wait and see attitude. Would have been best for the platform if this kind of thing we're done in the background and quietly. But I guess there was pressure to release some news that would appease investors.

Not a very bright move, if you ask me.

Posted from my Zed 10

[Herschel321]

Advertising sucks for BlackBerry, no commercial shows how using a BlackBerry is helpful and fun and feature packed. Hardware needs to be number one to attract geeks, im not and im disappointed my phone is dual core 1.5 instead of quad 1.7. We need top of the line apps or nobody will buy the phone. Word of mouth is the best form of advertising so it's not easy to brag about a phone with no good internal, and no good apps

Posted via CB10

[Benjamin_NYC]

Given their lackluster performance, BBRY owes it to shareholders to explore strategic options including partnership and/or sale, no matter how much some here may dislike the fact.

Posted via CB10

[pkcable]

Folks,

We are going to use this thread for discussions about the announcement, please do NOT start any new threads on this topic. We are going to close such threads. Talk about it here.

[Chicago777Guy]

I disagree with OP...its not about OS it's about time and time is not what stock market is willing to give to BBRY...I came from iphone and I can tell you it is no match to BB10...Turnarounds are like big ships and take years not quarter by quarter sales numbers....Probally going private is the right coarse of action...too bad for some of us who are willing to wait will not get chance of seeing it's true potential and upside.


Posted via CB10

[richrockx]

I just don't want them to sell, power through, maybe go private, get away from the corporate masters, and oh leverage your elliptic curve crypto patents

Via CB10

[CairnsRock]

These buyout deals are usually behind the scenes, unless, as in this case, nobody is interested. Then you have to go public with the "For Sale Sign".

[kenicolo]

Sometime being the smartest kid does not get you the girl... but the rich kid with swag gets them all.... sad

Posted via CB10

[Bacon Munchers]

I've said it in so many ways on other threads and am certain that many folks agree,that the bb10 QNX kernel is superior. There is no mobile related task in today's march-to-dominance that it could not do.

The major problem that keeps the boat anchor attached to the BlackBerry progress boat, is the lack of support and solid functionality in bb10, and launching the OS with crippling bugs that no serious user wants to deal with; even though I give them koodos to the current attempted fixes, albeit a bit late in the game.


Comparing the OS maturity of function on my bold 9900 with my Z10 is sort of like comparing the Afro-American fella in the Old Spice commercial, with (input young, naive super-star athlete here).

[birdman_38]

If Jim Balsille wouldn't have spent so much time, energy and focus on trying to buy an NHL team (when he knew it was going to be shot down) BlackBerry wouldn't be in the mess it is in today.

[Skatophilia]

I think the answer is quite clear.... Thor and the crew go to Apple's headquarters in California and plant some explosives

[Robin Lim]

These buyout deals are usually behind the scenes, unless, as in this case, nobody is interested. Then you have to go public with the "For Sale Sign".

I agree, unfortunately.

Me. I am going to ignore all this. Bought another app yesterday and am shopping for another one. Let's not make this a self fulfilling prophecy.


Posted from my Zed 10

[sosumi11]

Hiding the financials will not result in a better product. This is the first step in the disassembly of BlackBerry.

After Google's $12.5 billion Motorola purchase and HP blew $1.2 billion on Palm (and a slick WebOS), what company's Board of Directors would approve throwing multiple times this amount into another handset maker?

If BlackBerry itself can't help BlackBerry, then who would want to?

[the_sleuth]

I came across this gem from last year:
BlackBerry CEO Hints Research In Motion May Be Up For Sale – ReadWrite

TH message has been fairly consistent during his tenure as CEO, "Everything is on the table." Let's hope a buyer shows up before the next earnings release. Also with BlackBerry "up-for-sale" comments, do people think the average consumer or enterprise customer will hesitate to purchase BB10 devices until the dust settles on BB's "strategic review"?

[RubberChicken76]

If Jim Balsille wouldn't have spent so much time, energy and focus on trying to buy an NHL team (when he knew it was going to be shot down) BlackBerry wouldn't be in the mess it is in today.

I think people seriously overstate this issue and somehow think he spent 90% of his time on it, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 3 years.

[RubberChicken76]

BB10 needed to launch with every, I mean every Top 10 app in every category from the Apple App Store and Google Play store. No excuses. If they had all the top 100-200 apps, you wouldn't need the other crappy 70,000. BB's efforts and money shoulders be been focussed in getting these top apps by launch time, not on the Jam sessions. By all accounts the Jam sessions have been nothing but a huge flop. The efforts would have been better directed if they had focused only on the important apps that people do use. Once you have the top apps that people want, the phone would have taken care of the rest. That way people wouldn't be complaining so much about apps.

Carried over from the other thread.

1. Alec's job is not to get the top apps. That's Marty Mallick's. So the criticism is misdirected when it comes to key strategic apps.

2. While I get the ecosystem problem, I think anyone who thinks they don't also realize the need for key apps is naive. Of course they get it. But again, for all the legends in the field of business development/strategic aliances who seem to frequent this forum, what would you do to get those key apps that hasn't already been done? How would you improve upon the existing strategy to convince big developers to join the fold?

[birdman_38]

I think people seriously overstate this issue and somehow think he spent 90% of his time on it, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 3 years.

Did I say he did?

[Dzyen]

I disagree with OP...its not about OS it's about time and time is not what stock market is willing to give to BBRY...I came from iphone and I can tell you it is no match to BB10...Turnarounds are like big ships and take years not quarter by quarter sales numbers....Probally going private is the right coarse of action...too bad for some of us who are willing to wait will not get chance of seeing it's true potential and upside.


Posted via CB10

Although I agree that going private is in their best interest, im worried that they won't be able to hold out long enough to make a significant turn around and be able to tell the tale.

The amount of investment (in both time and money) to give BlackBerry a boost in its pathetic North American market share might be too large of a task for the company which has already been grasping at straws with the development of BB10.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see the company succeed and I swear by their products. However the only thing that can help BlackBerry is its own management and so far I don't think they've been doing too hot.

[ranzabar]

BB has no ecossystem, sad but true.It's too late to launch services to compete with services from Apple, Microsoft and Google. BB stopped by the time, coz were in the comfort zone.

The only chance is to partner with media companies like Yahoo, not hardware companies. In USA market, will be perfect a Blackberry with Yahoo services.

Yahoo Blackberry Y10.

Microsoft with Nokia and Google with Motorola is growing (and remember, Samsung has grown because Google' Android) . Apple with your own iPhone is decreasing. Logically, Yahoo with Blackberry both will grow

feh. Like a Facebook phone? Count me out

[jay64]

One strategy to test short positions is to float nebulous private buyout plans which tend to inflate pps short term, as has been the case this week. Week kneed shorts cover, as the trading patterns this week indicate, which gives some additional momentum to upward pps. The strategy grows stale as the news becomes old and professional shorters knock the pps down again off deflated expectations in the marketplace. Private equity firms have been circling BB for at least a year but the numbers have not made sense at a lower pps so why would it go now ? Will be interesting to see how this plays out. Private equity firms are in the business of making money, not "saving" companies. Forcing some shorts to cover and generating rumor momo inflated the pps but also made the company more expensive to buy, at least on paper, so it is a two edged strategy. They may need to let some of the air out of the pps before it becomes attractive for buyout.
Then we are back to where we started before the buyout strategy was highlighted. Would love to take a peak back at insider trading after this blows over. What is for sure is that a lot of options were "in the money" after this move which were previously not in the money.

[Robin Lim]

I think a lot of this new focus on strategic alternatives may be the need to make new plans after realizing BlackBerry 10 really needs 2GB of RAM and nothing can be done about it. This means BlackBerry won't be able to offer competitive hand sets at lower price points for another year or two.

This makes holding it's current user base of Curve owners rather difficult and pretty much ensures that market share will continue to drop.

Windows Phone growth right now is fueled by devices like the Nokia Lumia 520, which costs about a third of the price of a Q5.

Posted from my Zed 10

[Superfly_FR]

I [Armchair CEO - you know what to think about this ] wannalike ...

As the situation is not evolving much since this "announcement", I'm playing with my thoughts and try to put them together to backup what I believe the greatest opportunity for BlackBerry is. Not easy to organize, but I try.

1. Guts feeling
I've been around a lot of official BlackBerry events (devcons, Press Realtions (FR)) and managed to talk with official rep almost every time. There's one subject that I've been asking about at least once for each of them : "What about MS ?".
The least I can say is that the MS/BlackBerry partnership has always been somehow eluded and what I felt is that there was kinda "love/hate" relationship between these two companies. In short; "love" because they share the same target : break the SAM/AAPL duopoly, "hate" because they are direct opponents. Yet, I've never read nor heard any vindicative statement from one against the other, kind of "non aggression plan" I've mentioned in my posts for years.
Lately, at a French P.R meeting (Q5 launch), I had the opportunity to discuss with a BB enterprise relationship representative. Of course, I asked again, this time with a more targeted angle : office365 (witch is supported via BB Business Cloud Services for legacy devices, not for BB10). The answer was - and that's a great news - "It's on the road map, but no announcement has been made officially by headquarters so I cannot comment further and give any date nor details". Call the firemen, I can see smoke curtain here. I swear I tried hard, used all my tricky techniques to get some kind of info ... nada, nichts, niente, zero, rien : not a word. Asking the PR, the enterprise rep was clearly singing the "end of discussion" tune ... MY feeling was - analyzing his body language (eyes, smile, posture) - "Something is going to happen, sooner than later".
Add to this the announcements and curious "missed opportunities":
- BBM x-platform, but not on WP8 : really ?
- MSN, native on BB10 ?
- Win based apps written in Cs but no portage or shared dev tools (that's the weirdest to me) ?

[And now, you know what my likey guess is]

2. Who in the world could match the BlackBerry DNA ?
"You cannot marry carps with rabbits".
I believe their core DNA sums up in a few words : Enterprise, Security, reliability. This is where their "glorious times" came from, BBM (still secure and reliable) being an unexpected Joes feature adoption.
If you look at the market right now, despite the "doom and gloom death of the PC hype", MS is still a (the ?) major actor in enterprises, with both "on premise", "stand alone" or "in the cloud" (!important) massively adopted standards (SQL, Exchange, Sharepoint, Lynk, Office, Skydrive ...). Security and reliability are - by nature - MS concerns for ages.

P.S: You'll probably find other actors in the industry that share these concerns (Cisco, IBM, SAP to name a pinch of them), I do not deny that. It's oriented to serve my theory.

3. What for (tech POV) ?
If you look in BlackBerry assets, beside their noticeable "trust-able and proved efficiency and security" image, two are particularly significant for MS.
a/ The NOC. This infrastructure, connected to hundreds of carriers data centers worldwide is u.n.i.q.u.e. Bottom up security, compression, interoperability for mobile connected devices (not only smartphones). Working. Now.
b/ The patents. I should even limit to one : Elliptic Curve Cryptography. SSL/TLS (search for "BEAST TLS SSL" in your fav search engine) is under fire now and once there's a breach ... we know the story.

4. What for (commercial POV) ?
None of them (MS,BB) really succeeded as of date. Let's sum up and state they are tie #3 with barely-enough-to-survive market shares. I do believe both thought they could achieve grabbing market shares on a larger scale (MS: general audience with deep pockets - BB : selected "niche" with shoestring) but time is ticking and every $ the duopoly is earning makes the game trickier.
They both played the "gentleman good luck" fair competition and none won. Diversity didn't catch attention.
IMHO, time has come for collusion. "Unity is strength", with separate OSes and platforms talking "the same language".

5 How ?
For many reasons, I don't believe BB going private - alone - is a valuable solution. Yes, it will lower the pressure but does it worth the price ? The length of the procedure, the conflicting valuation (we know how "bears" are good for this), the "static" valuation (V.S growing cap by SP valuation) ... I surely can be wrong, but I don't buy it "as is".
"Split".
That's the word I have in mind. But I don't mean it as we've read it so many times : software V.S hardware. I read it as "Enterprise division and Individuals division".
Technically, my skills are so weak I cannot really figure how this could materialize. Something like a cross join-venture; A BlackBerry holding (NOT private) with Two separate childs ... where one (Enterprise) may be a joint venture MS/BB and the other recapitalized with fresh money (Prem W., CAN funds ...) ????
That's a tricky montage but I guess this would be the most efficient and durable.

Oh yeah, I'm (still) a dreamer !