Ever since Blackberry turned in its abysmal numbers, stories have vacillated between “Blackberry goes private and becomes a 900 pound gorilla behind the cloak, then emerges to terrorize the industry” and “Blackberry gets bought by somebody who terrorizes the industry.” You probably see the common denominator here. Blackberry in any non-dead state is a terror to the industry.
I blogged last week that there was in fact a way that a Private Blackberry Rampant model might indeed be a bit of a game-changer. I still believe that could be, staying with my general military-induced precept that you judge an enemy by its capabilities not its intentions. It would be logical to think that Blackberry might be able to pull the same terrorizing stunt as the pawn of some other industry giant, but we’ve all seen how industry giants tend to take root and become trees, innovation-wise. Would Cisco or Google or SAP, the three companies named as potential Blackberry suitors even be logical candidates to pick up the ailing smartphone company, and would any of them have any realistic options to make a go of it? Let’s go in alphabetical order through our list.
Cisco has mobile aspirations for sure, and they have to be worried about the fact that operators do tend to give a big chunk of mobile business to the guys who can support either RAN or handsets. Cisco’s deal with Facebook on WiFi deployment seems like a serious case of RAN-envy to me. Might grabbing a handset be a smart move for Cisco?
On the plus side, Cisco could probably do a lot to create the cloud/appliance symbiosis I recommended for Blackberry. Build a kind of Linux shell that looked like the new Blackberry OS to an application, and you could port stuff between the cloud and the device—the big step in my rehab plan for BB. Cisco has servers, a cloud distro of their own, and more than enough ambition and sales moxie to push this through. By making the appliance part of the cloud, Cisco might also throw some FUD into VMware’s HQ, which Chambers would like.
On the minus side, Cisco has been shedding consumer products and appliances. They might find smartphones different because they’re really kind of sold to carriers not directly to consumers, but surely it would be a big management distraction, and it still doesn’t give Cisco a RAN story. Nokia sold their handset stuff off to Microsoft, which suggests the in crowd thinks RAN trumps handsets story-wise.
Google already has handsets, of course. It’s very doubtful that Google would want to keep a competing OS if they had Blackberry, so the big question would be whether Blackberry’s customer base (carrier and business users, primarily) would be worth what Cisco would have to pay if there was no real technology they wanted. Blackberry has some patents I’m told, and some still think patents are why Google bought Motorola.
SAP is complicated. This is a software company, for gosh’s sakes! But on the other hand, mobility is the key element in what I’ve been calling Point of Activity Empowerment, which is where Blackberry’s big chance would be. Productivity is the key to SAP’s own future, and if they could create a PofAE model by grabbing Blackberry, it could pay off really big for SAP. Who, by the way, really needs something to pay off in the cloud. Despite everything from nomenclature revolutions to entertainment, SAP hasn’t been able to show any cloud strategy beyond, “Well, we can run on one”. That’s hardly compelling given that darn near everything can run on one.
The issue for SAP may be the same issue Nokia faced on handsets. European companies just don’t seem to have the marketing fire in the belly needed to make a go of things in the mobile device space. Some would argue that Canadian companies don’t either (look at Nortel), which might have been Blackberry’s problem in the first place. The fact that SAP might be able to sell a PofAE story to business wouldn’t erase the fact that being a business smartphone wasn’t enough for Blackberry. Would it be enough for SAP? If not they might be better off selling a smartphone unit than buying one; Brooklyn Bridge, anyone?
Where this leaves us, IMHO, is that none of the three proposed buyers of Blackberry have any clear shot at making the deal work out. Cisco isn’t as bad off here as the other two in my view, but I think they’d be better off sticking to their WiFi strategy or pushing to buy a RAN player. Maybe NSN? Even for Cisco, though, the story of PofAE is pretty complicated, and Cisco doesn’t like complicated educational sales stories. They like the “Traffic Chicken Little” tale a lot better, as we’ve seen again recently with their “Internet of Everything Sucks Your Network’s Blood Like a Lamprey Eel” story.
This is all relating to my vision of the Blackberry supercloud move I blogged about last week. Could there be M&A based on some more pedestrian asset set? Cisco and SAP have been talked about as buyers of Blackberry’s secure email/messaging processes, for example. I’m not impressed by that logic unless the deal is a fire sale because I don’t think it would be difficult for Cisco or SAP to replicate the technology and if they don’t buy the whole business it’s not clear how they’d be able to keep the messaging service alive if the phones went elsewhere—or nowhere.
So sorry, Blackberry and Wall Street Speculators. I don’t see any of these three companies making a buy of Blackberry work and I’m not prepared to propose they’re dumber than I am. The best hope for Blackberry is indeed to take the Dell path to private company and work out something compelling behind the scenes. That way they get to keep the money, too.