This morning while sipping coffee and waiting for the cerebral fog to lift something occurred to me.
Facebook wants a phone. RIM wants to live.Hmm.
— Dave Lewis (@gattaca) May 30, 2012
Apparently, Facebook wants a phone. And Research in Motion…well, let’s be honest, wants to live. Could this be a possible outcome? Well, let’s have a look. Facebook now has roughly $61 billion in market capital thanks to their recent IPO. They’ve recently purchased Instagram for a seemingly insane sum. Now, they’re apparently shopping for new toys such as Face.com.
Research in Motion by comparison has dipped down to $5.88 billion at the time of this writing. Mind you this is pre market open on May 30, 2012. When you take into account the sinking ship impression that has been coming from the Waterloo Ontario firm with the stock at fire sale prices, possible layoffs and the chance of a $1 billion write down in unsold inventory. RIM is ripe for the plucking and Facebook has demonstrated that they have a sweet tooth.
Now, to the salient point. What if Facebook did in fact purchase RIM? What would become of the software security that certain people have come to know any love in their Blackberry devices? I’m not saying that it would tank but, Facebook has not had an overly stellar track record when it comes to handling security and privacy issues.
What are your thoughts?
Folks have been writing off RIM for a while now. These may turn out to be premature autopsies and may yet give way to a last act in this play.
(Image used under CC from frozencapybara)