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BlackBerry Met With Facebook Last Week to Discuss Potential Bid

30 points by kloncks 13y ago

taylor-smith 13y ago
A usatoday article? C'mon
selmnoo 13y ago
> Cisco, Google and SAP are among the other tech firms reportedly weighing bid Fascinating. All the while we here at HN thought Blackberry was just done, done, and done, we see all these companies lining up with interest to buy? While we thought it wouldn't be acquired by any serious buyer, the 'Warren Buffet of Canada' makes the move? We just live in another world don't we. Does anyone want to comment on this -- the big difference in our line of thinking (the typical HN reader) and that of the finance world on the outside?
- grinich 13y ago
  RIM has lots of patents. I imagine this is why they are strategically interested. It's obviously not for their product lineup.
- recuter 13y ago
  BBRY has a market cap of ~4B, and 1.5B in cash still. So really they are being picked up for practically nothing. Edit: Make that 2.6B in cash apparently (as the article says).
  - bdc 13y ago
    BBRY Market cap today: $4.3 bn Cash: "about $2.6 bn in cash" Patents: "estimate [...] between $1 bn and $3 bn" That leaves not a whole lot of value in the company's other assets after the cash and patents - their personnel, supply chains and branding are valued at almost zero in the market. I'm kind of amazed by that.
    - kamkazemoose 13y ago
      Maybe they have some other debts to balance out their assets?
      - abrahamsen 13y ago
        According to the article, no. > BlackBerry is sitting on about $2.6 billion in cash and has no debt,
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  It's the same sort of thing that causes people to write off microsoft. Even a company in decline will often take years doing so. It is a little justified though, the market changes rapidly and being on the wrong side of the acceleration curve can cause your company to crater at frightening speeds. The thing about blackberry is they're not failing for ordinary reasons. They can't be fixed the way you'd rescue a once popular restaurant. It will take a lot of work to make them relevant again and only a few companies can do so. Of all of them I think google's bid is the one most likely to be the most interesting. It's a perfect door for google into the business realm, if they can execute well it could lead to gdocs, android, and even chromeOS becoming major, multi-billion dollar businesses.
- selmnoo 13y ago
  Why am I getting downvoted so much? (I'm not asking this flippantly, or protesting the fact that I'm getting downvoted. I'm just interested in knowing why -- I had no malevolent intention with the comment, I just wanted to ask a question basically.)
  - na85 13y ago
    As a relative newcomer (who didn't downvote) I can tell you that HN is a massive echo chamber.... That is the polite word for circlejerk. Opinions here are often heavily biased and the groupthink causes them to be self-reinforcing. In a world of serial entrepreneurs we've come to the oft-touted idea that "execution trumps ideas." Along the way that got perverted, and now people think you don't need to build something in demand. If your Execution is done well, a market will materialize. As a result the culture here is at times a hipster culture: the Old is denigrated while the New is idolized.
- stevenwei 13y ago
  I don't see any incongruity. Google paid $12.5 billion for Motorola a few years ago. Considering RIM's market cap was $83 billion at one point, paying ~$4-5 billion now would probably be a bargain for their patent portfolio.
boyter 13y ago
I always thought that Blackberry would be a strategic buy for Oracle. They would then be in a position to provide near end to end business services for enterprises assuming assuming they started manufacturing laptops and PC's or acquired someone already in that space.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
samstave 13y ago
FB phone an epic flop - let's buy the dinosaur of the market! Id love to see FB buy rim just to see the debacle of throwing their hubris at the HW and see how widely it misses the mark.
programminggeek 13y ago
BlackBerry still has millions of customers and a pretty decent OS built, someone could buy them and probably do pretty well, especially someone like Lenovo, Oracle, Dell, IBM, etc.
jjoe 13y ago
This somewhat explains (but doesn't justify) their desperate, last minute push of BBM across competing platforms. With real subscriber cash flow taking a nose dive, reasoning now is let's grab user market share and look good for a sell out pulling the social network card that's BBM.
redthrowaway 13y ago
Print version for those that prefer their text to be text: http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304655104579165781081533064-lMyQjAxMTAzMDIwOTEyNDkyWj#printMode http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304... A word to the wise for those who don't: find a nice, quite corner of the screen, and leave your cursor there. WSJ seems to think that every single element on that page needs to have a big tooltip that jumps out and blocks the article whenever your cursor grazes it.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

30 points by kloncks 13y ago

A usatoday article? C'mon

> Cisco, Google and SAP are among the other tech firms reportedly weighing bid Fascinating. All the while we here at HN thought Blackberry was just done, done, and done, we see all these companies lining up with interest to buy? While we thought it wouldn't be acquired by any serious buyer, the 'Warren Buffet of Canada' makes the move? We just live in another world don't we. Does anyone want to comment on this -- the big difference in our line of thinking (the typical HN reader) and that of the finance world on the outside?

grinich 13y ago
RIM has lots of patents. I imagine this is why they are strategically interested. It's obviously not for their product lineup.
recuter 13y ago
BBRY has a market cap of ~4B, and 1.5B in cash still. So really they are being picked up for practically nothing. Edit: Make that 2.6B in cash apparently (as the article says).
- bdc 13y ago
  BBRY Market cap today: $4.3 bn Cash: "about $2.6 bn in cash" Patents: "estimate [...] between $1 bn and $3 bn" That leaves not a whole lot of value in the company's other assets after the cash and patents - their personnel, supply chains and branding are valued at almost zero in the market. I'm kind of amazed by that.
  - kamkazemoose 13y ago
    Maybe they have some other debts to balance out their assets?
    - abrahamsen 13y ago
      According to the article, no. > BlackBerry is sitting on about $2.6 billion in cash and has no debt,
InclinedPlane 13y ago
It's the same sort of thing that causes people to write off microsoft. Even a company in decline will often take years doing so. It is a little justified though, the market changes rapidly and being on the wrong side of the acceleration curve can cause your company to crater at frightening speeds. The thing about blackberry is they're not failing for ordinary reasons. They can't be fixed the way you'd rescue a once popular restaurant. It will take a lot of work to make them relevant again and only a few companies can do so. Of all of them I think google's bid is the one most likely to be the most interesting. It's a perfect door for google into the business realm, if they can execute well it could lead to gdocs, android, and even chromeOS becoming major, multi-billion dollar businesses.
selmnoo 13y ago
Why am I getting downvoted so much? (I'm not asking this flippantly, or protesting the fact that I'm getting downvoted. I'm just interested in knowing why -- I had no malevolent intention with the comment, I just wanted to ask a question basically.)
- na85 13y ago
  As a relative newcomer (who didn't downvote) I can tell you that HN is a massive echo chamber.... That is the polite word for circlejerk. Opinions here are often heavily biased and the groupthink causes them to be self-reinforcing. In a world of serial entrepreneurs we've come to the oft-touted idea that "execution trumps ideas." Along the way that got perverted, and now people think you don't need to build something in demand. If your Execution is done well, a market will materialize. As a result the culture here is at times a hipster culture: the Old is denigrated while the New is idolized.
stevenwei 13y ago
I don't see any incongruity. Google paid $12.5 billion for Motorola a few years ago. Considering RIM's market cap was $83 billion at one point, paying ~$4-5 billion now would probably be a bargain for their patent portfolio.

boyter 13y ago

I always thought that Blackberry would be a strategic buy for Oracle. They would then be in a position to provide near end to end business services for enterprises assuming assuming they started manufacturing laptops and PC's or acquired someone already in that space.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

samstave 13y ago

FB phone an epic flop - let's buy the dinosaur of the market! Id love to see FB buy rim just to see the debacle of throwing their hubris at the HW and see how widely it misses the mark.

programminggeek 13y ago

BlackBerry still has millions of customers and a pretty decent OS built, someone could buy them and probably do pretty well, especially someone like Lenovo, Oracle, Dell, IBM, etc.

jjoe 13y ago

This somewhat explains (but doesn't justify) their desperate, last minute push of BBM across competing platforms. With real subscriber cash flow taking a nose dive, reasoning now is let's grab user market share and look good for a sell out pulling the social network card that's BBM.

redthrowaway 13y ago

Print version for those that prefer their text to be text: http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304655104579165781081533064-lMyQjAxMTAzMDIwOTEyNDkyWj#printMode http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304... A word to the wise for those who don't: find a nice, quite corner of the screen, and leave your cursor there. WSJ seems to think that every single element on that page needs to have a big tooltip that jumps out and blocks the article whenever your cursor grazes it.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]