Rumor: Lenovo reportedly considering a bid to buy BlackBerry

Lenovo reportedly considering a bid to buy BlackBerry

Thoughts?

 

Would be interesting, though security would come into question, especially for government and companies that require data security.

 

Speaking of Blackberry, I really like my Torch. Excellent keyboard (yeah I know) that is backlit and is lovely to send text messages on. Physical keys on a phone make send quick messages very nice and smooth.

As for Lenovo buying Blackberry, yawn. Another merger, another line of products getting diluted and merged with other products. If it happens, though.

 

Meh, who knows if anything will come of it.

I bet almost every phone manufacturer will sign a non-disclosure agreement with BlackBerry to take a look at the company's books. Firms usually just want to learn more about the business they currently compete with and a business that one of their competitors might buy. It would be remiss for Lenovo NOT to look at Blackberry's books while they have the chance.

 

I don't see it happening.

If it does, I know my employer will be dropping BB like a hot potato, and issuing us...something else.

As would many governments around the globe.

My $0.02 only...

 

All I can hear are the echoes of HP buys Palm...

 

Apples and oranges IMO. HP was (and arguably still is) horribly mismanaged and shrinking, and had virtually no presence left in the cellphone market when it bought Palm's half-dead business. Lenovo seems to have it together being the the only PC maker with growing sales, and its phone business is growing as rapidly as RIM's is shrinking.

Still, I have my doubts Lenovo will buy RIM. Many other suitors out there, and then there's the Canadian government's protectionism to contend with.

 

It would be nice to see BB get a proper burial. Lenovo can afford it.

 

It's very unlikely Lenovo would be allowed to acquire Blackberry. It's possible that it could acquire just the hardware handset IP, but that's a long shot and not in Blackberry's best interest.

Lenovo's PCs are banned by government agencies in U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand and some other countries because of "backdoors" found in their hardware.

BlackBerry's most valuable asset is their internal secure email network, and since their secure email network is approved by and used by these governments, Lenovo would never be allowed to acquire it.

There was a news article published on Reuters about this just yesterday.

 

If Lenovo buys Blackberry, then Blackberry can be revived. It might mean a death of the brand in the international goverments, but that sacrafice is well wroth the access to the chinese market. True Blackberry fans would still follow the brand just like Thinkpad.

Currently, BB10 is the best smartphone OS in terms of features. The only think blackberry needs presently is competitive hardware (BB is still selling 2011 quality hardware) and more apps (the BB10 app store is a joke, many popular apps are missing, a large number is spam, and users are resorting to semi-successful old android ports.)
With Lenovo however, they can put the best of blackberry (messaging, UI) and put in on Andoid to instantly solve the Apps problem. Then we can all trust Lenovo with decent hardware. As for the reputation problem, Blackberry is dying anyway, so might as well give up and the American market and aim overseas.

 

Well, BB's biggest fans are governments of all sizes and large corporations that value their security highly, and none of them will touch a Lenovo-branded product with a 30-foot pole...

Not to mention the fact that Canadian government won't allow such a sale...not by a long stretch.

 

No True Scotsman...

Anyway, Being bought up by a larger, successful company (assuming that the Canadian government would even allow BB to be bought by Lenovo) will not necessarily result in BB turning their luck around. An example I can think of is Microsoft first using Nokia as a flagship WP maker, then recently just buying them out. Despite that, Nokia's still not doing so well in the smartphone market since switching from Symbian to Windows Phone, though at least Nokia has their dumbphone market to fall back on, an option BlackBerry does not have. This is probably because they run Windows Phone now, and that's not exactly a widely popular OS (though I personally love WP and I own a Lumia), and I can't image why porting BlackBerry to Android would help, aside from apps. IMO, that'd just make BB "just another Android maker" in the already-crowded Android phone OEM market.

The major, major problem, ignoring the other problems like app market, marketing, and such, is what others have previously pointed out: secure communication. Blackberry, as they current stand, and in the past, can offer a high amount of security and I don't feel that their security reputation has faded much at all. Hell, I shake my head whenever I see people wanting to use Android, iOS, and Windows Phone in the same way that BB has historically been used, since those mobile operating systems have much weaker security models than BlackBerry. On the flip side, Lenovo has *no* reputation for data security. Partly because they don't offer such data protection services, and partly because a decent chunk of Lenovo is owned by the Chinese government, which means Western governments and companies with a high security requirement won't trust them. If Lenovo were to buy BlackBerry, they'd only succeed in destroying BlackBerry's security reputation and not doing much to improve Lenovo's. As for Thinkpads, they're nice and all as far as build quality and such, but there's still the "what if the Chinese are installing backdoors in Thinkpads?" problem to contend with.

 

Agree that Lenovo buying RIM is a longshot. My hunch is that this is just a chance for Lenovo to look at the books while they can to learn about a competitor. Fascinated by the backdoor-on-Thinkpads paranoia. I'd not considered that before. Maybe once Lenovo gets to a certain PC market share the Chinese government will activate the world's largest botnet and take over the world.

 

Eh, personally, I see it as a stretch, though I understand why Western governments and such would ban them. As for a botnet, Lenovo would be shooting themselves in the head if they did that, since that would give a very, very good reason to never ever buy Lenovo products again. More likely, they're letting China silently collect data on Lenovo users. With government/companies, this is a very big issues, though at least imo I wouldn't care as much. China can learn all they want about me, but they can't do much to me (whereas if we switched out China for the US, then individuals will have a major problem). Just my two cents though.

 

As expected, the Canadian government shutdown the possibility of Lenovo taking over Blackberry due to "national security concerns".

 

My hat's off to them for doing so...very rarely do I praise government for displaying common sense (since governments usually do the opposite by default) but this is one such occasion...