Life at Research in Motion must be hard. You make phones no one wants anymore, the software that’s supposed to save your company is at least half a year away, operators have all but given up on you and are now looking to promote Windows Phone as the third viable option instead of your platform … so what do you do in a situation like that? According to Retuers, who cites The Sunday Times, you split the company up. The handset unit, the part of the company that moves boxes, becomes a separate entity, while the services unit, the guys who do push email, device management, and BBM, goes off to do their own thing. The report goes on to say that Amazon and Facebook are interested in buying RIM’s handset unit, though RIM is also exploring the possibility of selling themselves as an integrated company to Microsoft. All of this is speculation of course, but to be perfectly honest we don’t see RIM existing in the same way it does today by the end of this year.
How did RIM get this bad? They completely missed the whole “bring your own device to work” movement. If you’re an employee at a large company who issues everyone a BlackBerry, then you use a BlackBerry. There’s no real room to complain. But if your company starts saying you can use any phone you want, and that said phone will have no problem integrating with the company’s backend, then why on earth would you go with an ugly brick that’s dominated by a QWERTY keyboard?
Anyway, expect the vultures to come out if RIM eventually splits up. They have a treasure trove of patents that’s probably worth more than their current $5.17 billion market cap. To put that number into perspective, Google bought Motorola for $12.5 billion.
[Via: Phone Scoop]