BlackBerry stock spikes on Lenovo buyout mumble Shares in BlackBerry, the company formerly known as both RIM and a world leader in smartphone shipments, jumped up ten per cent on Monday after Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing said that a buyout "could possibly make sense." "External growth is all about opportunities," Yang told French financial newspaper Les Echos. "You can not rely …
Read up on QNX my friend. Their phone business may be hurting but QNX is the real value here and as long as they own that they will not just die. You did read the part about $2B in the bank? Their business may change but pretty hard to envision them as a dying company when they own an OS that is widely used in many industries. That being said, Chinese ownership would jeopardize the QNX market so I can't see a Blackberry buy out by Lenovo that would include QNX. Apparently many Cisco switches run QNX.....Home Land Security would not like that :-(
"Not gonna happen" is right!!! If anyone thinks that control of the most secure, highly-encrypted, hand-held device on the planet. and used by the White House, House of Representatives, Senate, Homeland Security, Pentagon, CIA, FBI, and dozens of other federal, state and municipal governments, will be turned over to the Chinese, I have a magnificent bridge in mid-town Manhattan, that you may be interested in buying.
The current Canadian government is selling off the tarsands to the Chinese government. Any controls on foreign investment have pretty much disappeared in the general move towards sucking up to American corporations. Stephen Harper's own mother would be for sale for the right price.
The problem is that the licensing fee would have to take into account the licensing fee for Android. It wouldn't bring in any money worth speaking of.
BlackBerry need to be given a chance. The relentless briefing against them suggests it won't happen, which is a pity. Annoying as OS 7 is, it is a very capable system which allows a great deal of control over device behaviour without needing add-ons. For some people (like my wife) the ability to control notifications in considerable depth is valuable, while having a big screen is of no importance whatsoever. OS 10 should build on this and be easier to use, but it won't get a chance in a world in which people never RTFM, and also think that, because after three years they can now kind of use an iPhone, it is "intuitive". It's very hard to get people to look at something which is significantly different from the installed base.
@grndzro,
"Canadian government will not allow this."
Perhaps, but they couldn't prevent it without nationalising the company. They, and many other western government, are to be able to control their mobile security to quite a high extent by being with Blackberry. However that's been heavily subsidised by other Blackberry customers.
Quite a lot of those other customers aren't likely to care who owns Blackberry, so the market pressure for the company to stay non-Chinese is going to be quite low. Only then will the governments learn the true cost of the capability that Blackberry currently provides.
The Canadian gov't has the ability to block sales of large corporations to foreign buyers... The Nexen petroleum sale to the Chinese that one of the earlier commenters referred to is an example. Took 6 months before the Canadian gov't approved it. (and the US gov't, because Nexen has large interests in US oil too)
Android is the only serious contender there. imo Lenovo should go for Windows Phone as they have lots of Enterprise customers. Android is far too insecure for that market.
The Blackberry model of dedicated network plus dedicated servers is redundant these days with the latest Exchange platforms. The only thing they have still really worth anything is their patents.
@AC,
"The Blackberry model of dedicated network plus dedicated servers is redundant these days with the latest Exchange platforms. The only thing they have still really worth anything is their patents."
You've not been keep up with events, have you? BB10 does Active Sync direct from the device, just like everyone else these days. Gone are the days that you have to run a BES service or connect to BIS if you were a consumer user and pay extra per month for a BB data plan.
Of course, BES is still there and does offer a very neat and thorough solution to the BOYD problem, if you can be arsed to read up about it before saying that it's redundant. And I'd say from my own experience that it's a whole lot faster and more battery efficient at pushing out notifications than an Active Sync connection, though you have to do a lot of reading first to understand why.
Because WP is the most rapidly growing market share opportunity, and grew over 100% in market share in the last year: http://blogs.computerworld.com/windows-phone/21779/windows-phone-sales-skyrocket-124-should-soon-overtake-blackberry
Since that was written, WP has overtaken Blackberry sales in most global markets.
Nokia just has the best WP handsets at the moment. Blackberry could help change that with a very different line up of hardware. I cant their current OS going very far for them with them as the only manufacturer.
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Whether or not the Canadian government can stop such a sale or not I can't see any US government agency, or any company doing business with the US government, using BlackBerrys if they were owned by a Chinese company. My company would drop them like a nuclear contaminated turd if that happened. With all the recent press about Chinese government hacking and past stories of Chinese companies doing the bidding of the government or selling products that come with malware pre-installed a lot of companies and governments would stop using them, even faster than they may otherwise.
"My company would drop them like a nuclear contaminated turd if that happened."
You'd better ditch all your PCs, mobiles, the lot then. There's practically nothing that wasn't wholly or partially manufactured in China, from complete devices to components. Even if you bought a US made mobile, what about the Ethernet controllers in the company servers?
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