Carl Icahn is a company’s worst nightmare. He buys up enough shares of your company to get himself a seat on the board, he then convinces the board that they need to just give up and break the company apart, and then when all is said and done he walks away with more money than you’ll ever make in your lifetime. He’s responsible for Motorola splitting up, so if it wasn’t for this one man then Google would have never purchased a handset maker. Rumor on the street is he’s looking to do the same thing to Research in Motion. He’s tired of RIM not living up to their potential and many analysts are saying that the Canadian company could fetch a handsome sum for their ~ 2,000 patents, and that if they separated the hardware business from the software guys, the ones who work on BlackBerry Messanger and that famous instant push email experience, then those assets will be incredibly attractive to potential buyers.
The bigger question here is what about RIM’s attempts at coming back to life? Sure, the PlayBook was a colossal failure, but people didn’t knock it for what it was capable of doing. They just said that it needed more bundled software. RIM needs time to fix their problems, time they don’t have, and they’re only dragging their reputation further into the hole with the half baked devices they’re bringing out to the market. By saying that they’ll move to QNX and obsolete their own propritary operating system, they basically shot themselves in the foot. Nokia did the same thing when they told the market back in February that they’d swtich to Windows Phone and that Symbian would become obsolete. Have you seen what that announcement did to their stock price?
Anyway, do you think RIM is done and that we should stab them with a fork, or do you think they’ve got something still left in em’?