[Superfly_FR]

Unfortunately, you cannot.

Only 500 can ...

[RubberChicken76]

Did I say he did?

Just a general comment. I doubt he actually spent very much time on this relative to running BlackBerry. And I also doubt that it would have made a difference to BlackBerry if he hadn't looked at this project.

You see this all the time, "He should have been focusing on BlackBerry not on buying a hockey team". It was likely a negligible effort, not something that took him away from the business.

[birdman_38]

Just a general comment. I doubt he actually spent very much time on this relative to running BlackBerry. And I also doubt that it would have made a difference to BlackBerry if he hadn't looked at this project.

You see this all the time, "He should have been focusing on BlackBerry not on buying a hockey team". It was likely a negligible effort, not something that took him away from the business.

Doubt that. The purchase of a professional sports franchise likely took a great deal of attention away from Balsillie's daily duties. Especially in the way he went about it...launching a public relations campaign to garner public support and using every possible angle in the legal system to find a loophole in order to gain the NHL board's approval.

He should have stepped down to pursue that personal business venture. It hurt RIM's chances of keeping pace in the rapidly changing landscape. Not putting the blame all on Jim Balsillie but he had better things to worry about at the time.

[Robin Lim]

For whatever reason, BlackBerry took a long time coming up with a modern touch screen operating system. But I guess for many phone manufactures, they did not realize this was the future until 2009. Nokia obviously was not keen on all though tech. One of their exec's called it a fad.

Still, Nokia got MeeGo in September 2011, but at the time Nokia has already committed to Windows. I think if BlackBerry had BB10 by Q3 2011, it would be a very different story today.

But for me, the major stumbling block right now is the hardware requirements. BlackBerry 10 runs great, but needs a lot of RAM. So BlackBerry 7 has to soldier on. That really is going to cause a lot of current users to migrate.

Posted from my Zed 10

[Otech#CB]

I don't want Blackberry to not be Blackberry anymore. I might even stop buying BB products if they decide to sell the company, and if the new owners trash the OS. I think if anyone should buy the company, it should be QNX Or any company that just offers its money and marketing skills, but nothing more. Sometimes change isn't good. Now I know BBM and BlackBerry might be two separate companies in the end, but my point is that I want the phone and the direction its updates are going in to stay the same. Does anyone else agree? Only people who own the phone should have a say (and maybe potential customers).

[Otech#CB]

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 !

For the "Split" are you talking about Strategic business Units (SBU)? I'm learning about that in my marketing class. Pretty interesting class. In my opinion, If they had enough money to run/manage both parts, software, and hardware separately, then that would be good. And honestly, that would help them focus on the work that their doing. Not saying that their not doing a great job now, but in the long-run, the company is going to have to expand as hardware company, as well as a software company like they have been doing thus far.

[Emily Peter]

BBRY has made an agreement with foxcon and is shifting focus to low end devices in Indonesia and other emerging markets. After the announcement the stock price increased even though company reported a loss of $4 billion. This shows that Investors seem to like this strategy