Research In Motion To Be Sold, Possibly To Samsung 218
New submitter ve6ay writes "The talk of the tech world over the past day is that RIM, struggling mightily in these last months, was in talks to be bought either partially or wholly by Samsung. Sources at the Boy Genius Report indicate that while RIM may be trying to sell, it is asking way too much for itself."
Old news is old (Score:5, Informative)
Old news is even denied by Samsung [reuters.com].
Re:Old news is old (Score:4, Funny)
SOPA blackout would have saved Soulskill some embarrassment.
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He would probably post it tomorrow anyway.
Re:Old news is old (Score:5, Funny)
He would probably post it tomorrow anyway.
According to Slashdot's dupe policy, he is obligated to.
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it's a trap (Score:4, Funny)
[activate foil hat] But that's exactly what they would say, isn't it?
Slashdot's choice of stories is puzzling (Score:4, Insightful)
There have been some real news stories, but slashdot won't publish those. Instead slashdot posts stories about rumors - even rumors that have been proved false.
Can't wait for the next TechGuy Google smear rumor to be published on slashdot.
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BGR has a history of posting false rumors about RIM. I'm not sure why anyone is surprised that this turned out the same. The only surprising thing was that anyone believed them in the first place (and many major media names did).
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I don't know why they'd want it either, seeing as they're heavily invested in Android, also have Bada, and have god knows how many no-name smart phone OSs on their low end devices. What would they want to buy a company for when their only appreciable asset is their (struggling) smart phone OS?
If someone does by RIM (and I can see it happening), my money is on one of the gadget-makers without a successful smart phone brand already. I could see one of the PC manufacturers going for it, such as Dell, Lenovo, A
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Dear me... is it that easy nowadays to influence stock prices? I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist - but seriously:
1. Buy RIM shares
2. Post some anonymous rumour on tech blog, watch share price jump.
3. Sell RIM shares.
4. PROFIT!
Technically speaking, a Conspiracy is three or more people who are in collusion with each other to commit an illegal act.
So if you're doing it all by yourself, it's not Conspiracy by definition, regardless of the legality.
But yeah, it works pretty well. At least, it works well if you're a day-trader.
Re:Old news is old (Score:5, Funny)
So, it's a pump-n-dump RIM job.
Um, rim shot.
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I prefer this:
1. Wait until RIM shares get boost.
2. Buy RIM puts.
3. Wait until RIM rumors disproved.
4. Sell RIM puts, i.e. profit!
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Down 2.2% today at time of writing this, so it failed.
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Not necessarily. If someone wanted to dump a whole lot of stock in very short order, it likely succeeded quite well. (And judging by the volume of RIMM share transactions since the rumor came out, that seems not-too-unlikely...)
It doesn't have to jump for long to be profitable to someone.
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It's called pump & dumping and it is a crime but you need to prove it.
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Maybe Samsung was confusing Bada with RIM?
Too late. (Score:5, Informative)
This rumor has already been dashed:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/top-business-stories/which-idiots-bought-rim-shares-on-one-shaky-rumour/article2306353/ [theglobeandmail.com]
Re:Too late. (Score:5, Funny)
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The LA Angels have also shown a penchant towards overpaying the past couple of years. If RIM could figure out some marginal baseball tie-in, they might be able to sucker Moreno into meeting their asking price.
Getting old (Score:2)
And to think, it was not too long ago that a Blackberry was "the phone to own".
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And to think, it was not too long ago that a Blackberry was "the phone to own".
Now it's the phone to get 0wned!
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According to our management, it still is!
(Unless you are said management, then the only right phone is the iPhone)
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It is still very much the phone of choice for teenage rioters in England. That's probably not good for its image in the premium market.
Is it still possible? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think this rumour of samsung buying out RIM is true, but it's worth noting that RIM's share price took a dive when Samsung denied it, theoretically that could have been a clever move by the big S to make the purchase cheaper.
Frankly, though, I don't think RIM has anything of value to offer Samsung.
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Plus, Samsung has their own mobile OS (BADA), as well as what's left of Nokia's Meego (Tizen). They certainly don't need BlackberryOS on top of that.
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The US President's Blackberry (Score:3, Interesting)
If I were the US president, I wouldn't want my Blackberry [infosecuri...gazine.com] to be at the mercy of a South Korean corporation. It's risky enough for a Canadian corp to be running such a sensitive device, but if it's going to be foreign (and so not entirely subject to US laws, and obviously having a national interest that sometimes competes with America's), Canadian is about the least risky. Especially after decades of integration with sensitive US operations, including the space arm on the NASA shuttles. But South Korea is not nearly as reliable, given its understandably different national interests and lower integration with US law. Not to mention the higher stakes in S. Korea with its insane nuke-armed neighbor changing kings and looking for new terms in their permanent war backed by the US.
In any case President Me would rather have an Android phone, with an OS my spooks could inspect with a fine toothed comb, than a closed OS - whether foreign made or not. I wouldn't want Steve Jobs' ghost having secret access to my top-secret iPhone messages, especially when there are so many laws and lawsuits Apple could use my help "fixing". Even just tracking my location through a commercial datacenter seems a breach of national security.
The US has such a large military, and budget to match, that I'd expect the White House to come with our own government smartphones on a secure network. There's no reason my phone couldn't use a gateway device carried by my entourage that goes over a secure military satellite network, even if the gateway is too big for me to carry myself. I don't carry the nuke football, either. But I could carry a civilian smartphone, battery out, in case I was separated from my entourage and as a last resort had to make a call on a public network.
Stock Prices? That's your kicker? (Score:2)
The most ignorant moment, however, comes in the itworld article, when they claim that stock movements are giving credence to the rumors: RIM went up by 6.7%.
That's what happens for rumors, even crazy ones: stock prices go up. Credible rumors, however, would produce more action than that. Actual plans in the works, actual offers on the table, would create much, much more: the same article talks about Yahoo!
I don't understand what went wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't understand what went wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
They failed at: reliability, uptime and ease of use
Real life example:
- Today i just missed a rescheduled meeting because my BlackBerry failed to ring the alarm (usually happens after too many days with no reboot);
- Had about 4 half-day to full-day outages in the last month;
- BES server upgrade caused ~15% of the Blackberry users in my department to lose access for around 3 days and then they had to reformat their devices to be able to receive mail again.
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How the f** can they screw up an alarm clock? It happened to me too. It just blew my mind.
I swapped my Blackberry 9700 for a Nokia C3. The Nokia does half as much, but I was sick of wasting my time with my unreliable POS Blackberry. The C3 was supposed to be temporary, it's not perfect, but I'm getting good at working around its quirks.
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Re:I don't understand what went wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Yup. I do IT support, and we support blackberries, iPhones, Android phones, etc. From my point of view, here's the breakdown:
Blackberry: People tell us they buy them because they're super-reliable business phones with lots of security features, but no one uses those security features and we get constant complaints about devices crashing, email not sending, and email not downloading. It's a headache to troubleshoot because of the weirdness of the setup-- resending service books, deactivating/reactivating phones is a hassle. Then every once in a while, every Blackberry in the world stops working because RIM essentially engineered a single point of failure for no apparent reason.
Android: Generally hard to support because there are so many models and they might be very different. How do you set up [x] on phone [y]? I don't know. I have to look it up because who knows which version of Android is installed or what UI customizations the manufacturer put on top of them? Most likely, I won't find good online instructions, so I'll need to get the phone in my hands and fiddle with it myself before I can say how to do anything with it. Other than that, they're kind of mostly fine. Some are good, but some are crap.
iPhone: If you don't have a specific reason to get a different kind of smartphone, just get an iPhone. They work. They're stable. There's a lot of development for the platform, and lots of things are well supported. I get very few complaints that aren't something obscure (e.g. why can't I sync Exchange public folders to my iPhone?), and most people are ultimately happy with them, even when they didn't think they would be ahead of time. I can tell you how to set up your email on an iPhone without looking it up, because it's the same on every iPhone and iPad. Email doesn't mysteriously stop syncing-- if it stopped syncing, you probably don't have reception or a Wifi connection. It's almost that simple.
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Your Blackberry experience matches mine, but the settings menu for Androids is exactly the same across all models. Load the settings app, go to accounts and sync, then press add account. I don't know of an Android phone that doesn't have this exact series of buttons.
Re:I don't understand what went wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Not all Android phones even have the same physical buttons along the bottom of the screen, and they're in different order sometimes. The procedure that you have to use to get to a list of applications can be different from one phone to another. Older Androids didn't even have Exchange support, though there's a generation of Android models where the manufacturer added in Exchange support before Google did, which I believe also leads to other possible variations in options.
Now I'm not saying it's bad, but it's not all simple and uniform. A lot of people I support aren't that tech savvy, and I need to give them instructions that are exact, i.e. "Press this button, scroll down halfway through the page until you see something labelled [whatever]. The third option on the next menu will be [whatever]..." If the placement in the list is different or the label is different, you may as well be speaking German.
And I don't say this because I'm intimately familiar with every model of Android, but I've had the experience of looking at an Android phone and saying, "OK, click this button, scroll down and look for an option that says [whatever]," and having the person on the other end go, "There is no option called [whatever]." Because they had a different model and the settings had been reorganized someplace else.
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At least you have an alarm that actually works with the phone off. Neither ios or android does this.
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I don't know about that. I took my BB out of the country, and switched it off, because I would otherwise incur stupidly steep data charges. I had a daily alarm turned on though...
First thing was the stupid phone woke up while I was in the plane. Now, that is probably not a big deal, but it turned itself on to ring the alarm. Old phone ued to only ring the alarm, but the blackberry has to turn everything on to ring the alarm. Ridiculous.
At the time I convinced myself that I had forgotten to turn the damn pho
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some people have more than one thing to remember, and for about 2 million years humanity had to worry about eating and taking a shit, and not much else unless there was a war
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some people have more than one thing to remember, and for about 2 million years humanity had to worry about eating and taking a shit
And bears. You forgot the bears.
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Re:I don't understand what went wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
(Posting AC because I'm at work)
I don't see at what point Blackberry failed?
What? Really? I can tell you the exact moment their downfall began. It's when the iPhone was announced and they decided they didn't have to adapt. Every other major phone maker quickly shifted gears, to one degree or another, except RIM. And RIM has been failing ever since. It's only recently that the downward fall has accelerated to this staggering degree but it all began the instant the iPhone was announced.
Re:I don't understand what went wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Sad.
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Except RIM and Nokia. RIM was still seeing sales growth, although their market share has taken a bettering. Nokia saw smartphone sales haemorrhage. It took them 4 years to bring out a product that is anywhere near competitive. It's proper facepalm failure.
Re:I don't understand what went wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
They were revolutionary in their day, but now everyone offers email on their phones...
They failed to move with the times, so now while they still offer the same features everyone else offers something more and RIM devices are now perceived as dated and boring.
Their products are tied to Microsoft (BES requires windows and is primarily tied to exchange), who released a competitor in the form of activesync and bundle it for free with exchange, rim cannot possibly be cheaper because if you have everything you need to run a blackberry server you also have activesync, and likely also have an MS sales rep in your ear.
They try to lock you in to their products (you need a blackberry server, a blackberry handset and a blackberry specific data plan), but aren't big enough to get away with this strategy... Even MS Activesync is more open, there are multiple implementations on both the client and server end, and they work with standard carrier data plans.
They route traffic through their servers, creating an additional single point of failure. With a standard data plan the traffic is routed by the telco to your server via the Internet... With RIM the data is routed by the telco to rim via the internet, who they route it back to you via the internet... If RIM has an outage (and they have had several recently) then you are dead in the water... If your internet connection or telco suffers an outage you have the ability to change provider with minimal fuss, if RIM has an outage you have to migrate away from blackberry to another manufacturer which means changing your server infrastructure and replacing handsets.
The non enterprise (ie consumer oriented) blackberry service is intentionally crippled.
It is becoming more common for employees to provide their own phones rather than using company supplied ones, not many people want to buy a blackberry for their own use (partly due to the crippled consumer level service).
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Businesses should care about closed and locked products, being locked into a single supplier is extremely bad for business long term and making your business depend on something which doesn't have a second source is an extremely bad practice.
Also in my experience, having both iphone and android for personal use and a work supplied blackberry, is that both web and email are considerably slower on the blackberry as well as both web/mail clients on the blackberry being extremely basic.
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Except that companies are now offering their employees a choice of smartphone. My company allows me to choose between iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia and Samsung. I unfortunately got a BB just before this change of policy and am stuck with it.
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Well one problem was, to qout a common cliche, "It's the interface stupid!" :-/
e.g.
The fonts on the BB are crap.
i.e.
The whole UI design suffers the same problem as the UI on the PS3 - it looks like it was designed by an engineer instead of the sexy UI of the iPhone or XBox360
Sexy devices sell. RIM completely under estimated the importance of having a clean, easy, consistent UI - the iPhone showed everybody you don't need to be stuck with shitty UIs on a phone - and sexy sells.
Re:I don't understand what went wrong (Score:4)
They failed because they refused to innovate, expecting that they would continue on customer loyalty alone. It hasn't happened.
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If you only want email. With BB you can also have the phone on your intraweb and access all the internal systems without exposing them on the internet.
sic transit gloria mundi (Score:5, Funny)
RIM joins a long range of former tech prom queens and class presidents that did not make it:
Palm, altavista, NeXT, digg, motorola, SGI, Sun, Spice Girls.
Re:sic transit gloria mundi (Score:5, Insightful)
Dunno if I'd include NeXT in that list. It was bought out by a bigger richer company that wanted its technology and IP, and I'm posting using that technology right now.
Re:sic transit gloria mundi (Score:5, Funny)
You are missing the point. I am using the energy and aminoacids from the Shith kebob I ate this morning. It does not make the chicken successful.
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If after breakfast, you had suddenly developed feathers, a beak, and the uncontrollable urge to peck at the ground, the chicken might be feeling a certain sense of satisfaction from its coop in Chicken Heaven.
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Actually, I'm surprised Apple didn't make a move. RIM's got a few good patents in their portfolio. One of their biggest is the keyboard patent (yes, the thumb board is patented, which is why the thumbboard on blackberries just feels a LOT better than any other thumbboard around. Too bad that the stuff around the keyboard sucks, though).
Beside
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from the last linked ot article (Score:2)
"dwarfed by its two superior competitors" Apple and Google. I'll give it to Apple because they actually build products but Google? How much does it matter how large they are they don't make the devices and it isn't either of those companies' only product so it isn't like they are dedicated to the market and that they wouldn't just pump their money elsewhere if it didn't work out.
Control and SOPA (Score:2)
Patents (Score:3)
RIM may not have a future as an independent company, but they should still be able to fetch a good price. They've got a nice fat patent portfolio, and likely also a nice portfolio of enterprise customers that are too locked-in to be switching from BB anytime soon.
RIM is already dead (Score:5, Interesting)
They just don't know it yet. I have their latest and greatest 9860 (because I don't have a choice - thanks corporate idiots), and it is a complete and utter piece of shit. The first phone bricked itself within the first week, common problem with this model. The screen is plastic, and feels like it. The touchscreen is horribly inaccurate, making typing on it something dreadful and to be avoided. The on/off button is the entire top of the phone, so when you slip it in a pocket, it is very likely to turn the screen on. It is so under-powered, I'm constantly playing the guessing game of "did I tap the dialog box or not". The "app store" looks like the bargain bin at Blockbuster. Every time I pick this phone up it pisses me off.
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if you get an e-mail with a body over 80K the BlackBerry wouldn't let you view all of it! Ha!
And if you are travelling internationally you will be very happy to come home without facing $10K+ phone bills because your phone auto-downloaded 10M attachments when roaming.
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that's why you have this option for "disable data usage when roaming" duh duh duh duh ..... on real phones, for the real world.
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Is the Blackberry OS so shit that there is no "Turn off data when roaming" option? Because on real phones what you said just never has a chance to happen.
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But if you turn off data, you are essentially offline.
With a BlackBerry you can stay online and available and it still won't cost you an arm and a leg.
Most email are simply a short bit of text with possibly some attachments.
When I am in another country I get all my normal emails, and most of them I can reply to there and then. If I need to examine the attachments or read a very long mail I can usually wait till I'm back at the hotel with Wifi and r
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The problem is that just -connecting- can cost an arm and a leg. If you dare start transmitting data (which your phone will do as soon as you are connected), you're going to lose the rest of your members.
This is why people don't really care about the 80K feature. Either you want to connect, or you don't.
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I almost wish the box had a baggie full of clay in it instead... At least that would be useful.
Bad management killed RIM. (Score:2, Funny)
I believe RIM is a formerly amazing company suffering from an advanced and fatal case of MBA.
I always heard that RIM was serious in to business culture. When the company does implode, I bet we'll find that the entire organization was pretty much completely comprised of various levels of middle managers and executives, with very few people getting actual work done.
RIM's products have severely stagnated and their new OS efforts are pretty much going nowhere. Worse, they can't even seem to port their core mess
Supposedly these rumours are not true... (Score:2)
The front page of today's Calgary Herald business section suggests the rumors are not true, Samsung is not interested in RIM:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Samsung+interested/6012112/story.html [calgaryherald.com]
An even better plan: (Score:5, Insightful)
An article for each senator who supports SOPA, with the corresponding senate.gov link
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By SOPA you obviously mean H.R 3261, or something that NO senators support, it being a House bill. The corresponding senate bill is PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), S.968.
Then what are we worried about? (Score:2)
I stand corrected. Sweet. If no senators support it what are we worried about? It can't become law without passing the Senate, per my hazy recollections of schoolhouse Rock.
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To be honest I'm a Brit with only hazy knowledge of US government, and at least in my head support == vote for, this may be a minority view. If I was a US citizen I'd be spamming my representatives right now, as this shit has got to stop, I doubt it will while corporations have so much power.
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Wikipedia's blackout is circumvented by NoScript.
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Or by simply disabling javascript in the browser.
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It may be easy for us, but what about your parents? or grandparents?
They're going to be voting on these same congress people, and will also be affected by these laws.
Which do you think they visit more Wiki/Google or slashdot?
Raising Awareness? (Score:2)
The purpose of the blackout is raise awareness for the SOPA/PIPA issue among the general public who use websites like Wikipedia and Google but due to a lack of coverage in the mainstream press haven't heard much about the proposed legislation. I doubt any reader of Slashdot isn't already keenly aware of this issue.
Re:Raising Awareness? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, I wholeheartedly believe it's the wrong aproach. The US really needs a legal overhaul - SOPA, PIPA and CIPA should be approved, put them through and let people live under this regime for 3-4 months, then people will start to notice how truly wrong the world has become.
A single day of black out will make people think "oh, but it's not my fight really". Make it stick, force people to jump through hoops to get their youtube and lolcat fix; then action will be taken and it will be swift.
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Adding another SOPA story would do better than a blackout.
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Any issue that has the ACLU, MoveOn, and the Tea Party Patriots shoulder to shoulder should definitely be paid attention to, and recognized as a universally bad idea.
If those three organizations can get together on it, surely the rest of us can too?
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Sorry, the "best thing to do" is pass laws guaranteeing freedom on the net, instead of blocking freedom. While simultaneously working on a network of anonymous encrypting proxies, I guess. Content owners do have right to implement technical measures to protect their property rights, but in the absence of government intervention, I believe the freetards can implement technical measures guaranteeing f
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The Chinese people are generally dissuaded
Contents owners do have the right to implement technical measures to protect their property rights, but only to extent it is legal (Sony root kit), and why do they want the right to shut down an entire domain, not hosted in the USA, for infringing *Civil* laws that might not even apply in the country where the server is hosted ...?
i.e. why should I in one country, be prevented in accessing a server in another country, that hosts files that are legal to distribute i
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This is the problem everyone has:
" but only to extent it is legal"
'Legal' is getting more ridiculous every year. cf copyright.
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While their proprietary data method generally sucks, it's not always a ripoff... In particular, their data roaming charges tend to be lower than standard data plans.
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It would be bad for both companies. Apple has repeatedly said that they don't care about the enterprise. The only thing that Apple would want is the patents.
Re:APPLE should buy RIM (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who works with mobility products in Fortune-50 business, I can tell you that Apple cares quite deeply for the enterprise. They just have a starting point of a consumer device, but with every software release it adds more and more of what enterprise wants. They are asking, enterprise is answering, and Apple is changing their stuff to suit.
RIM is not, and that's why RIM is dying.
RIM is adapting, don't kid yourself (Score:2)
RIM already has the enterprise market, and it is the most feature-rich mobile enterprise solution. Apple is inching to get there, but they are still a ways off.
While Apple is inching into enterprise, RIM is inching into consumer. They started at different positions, but attempting to cover both segments. Having said that, RIM will always be enterprise at heart, and apple will always be consumer at heart. Ap
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Rather I would
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That is probably a good solution. I do know that RIM is working on a multi-platform server to manage BB, iOS, Android and Windows devices. I'm not sure how long until they release it though.
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As someone who works with mobility products in Fortune-50 business, I can tell you that Apple cares quite deeply for the enterprise. They just have a starting point of a consumer device, but with every software release it adds more and more of what enterprise wants. They are asking, enterprise is answering, and Apple is changing their stuff to suit.
RIM is not, and that's why RIM is dying.
Is that why Apple stopped selling server hardware? Is that why they don't have anything that can possibly compete with Active Directory?
Please, Apple's goal is to push their consumer products into the enterprise by using their customers to demand use in business and not providing any tools to manage them. It's been 5 years since the release of the original iPhone. Where's the management tools? Apple simply doesn't care because they don't need to care. They are focused on selling consumer devices that j
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Why compete with AD when you can just extend the de facto standard with the attributes you need? Apple published a white paper on exactly how to do that: http://www.inspirednetworks.ca/site/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Modifying_the_Active_Directory_Schema.pdf [inspirednetworks.ca]
No one was buying Apple server hardware except for very few niche markets, and Apple likes being a company that actually makes money on products. Strange, I know, but that's where it is. There were rare places where an Xserve made sense, and they wer
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Patents maybe, the technology probably isn't worth much...
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And corporate customers too.