There have apparently been a few major companies that have voiced interest in acquiring fledgling Blackberry maker Research in Motion.
This week, reports from Reuters and the Wall Street Journal shed light on the fact that Amazon, Microsoft, and Nokia all had brief discussions with RIM to take over the company instead of letting Blackberry die a slow and painful death.
None of the companies in the reports had made solid, concrete offers and it doesn’t look like a takeover is imminent, but the mere notion that RIM would even entertain such a proposal is infinitely telling.
RIM took years to wake up and smell the coffee, until it finally realized the enterprise segment was not an automatic customer base and that Android and iOS posed a true threat to losing even the most ardent Blackberry fans.
The breath of fresh air was the Blackberry Playbook tablet. Although it hasn’t sold many units and critics found plenty of complaints about it, it was a brand new, from-the-ground-up operating system, which critics had been pushing RIM to offer for years.
Bringing that interface to the Blackberry smartphone line was planned to begin early next year, but RIM this month confirmed it would be pushed back to the second half of 2012 instead. By then, Nokia’s partnership with Windows Phone will be in its maturity and the dominance of Android and iOS will only continue to grow on a global scale.
Until then, RIM has to rely on its existing Blackberry software, which still has roots that date back to the early 2000s. There is no room for a platform like that in today’s mobile climate.
So, in other words, the idea of another company coming in to absorb RIM is not exactly surprising.
