RIM now worth only $14.45 billion, should Microsoft buy?

3 years ago RIM was worth more than $70 billion.  Today the still proud company is worth less than 1/5 of that value, $14.45 billion. Even then there were rumours that , and now with the company by comparison extremely cheap, the question arises again.

Buying RIM, who is now worth less than double Microsoft’s recent Skype purchase, would offer Microsoft unprecedented access to business communications, carrier relationships and even consumer relationships, and unlike Nokia a brand that means something in USA.

Of course RIM is in this position because they are losing their hold on this very market, and Microsoft may well just be catching a falling knife, but then it is a very cheap knife, with the company’s price less than 5 times of its annual earnings, which is pretty ridiculous for a tech company.

If Microsoft did buy the company they could run it as a going concern and strip it for its assets while transitioning their customers and technology to Windows Phone. Whether this will be worth the trouble and expense (estimated at $17 billion is a buyout premium) is of course not clear but such a deal would certainly have many attractive aspects, especially with Dell as a Blackberry challenger seriously fizzling away.

Do our readers think the time for a deal has come? Let us know below.

Buying a company and having a Nokia-like partnership are two different things. I don’t think Microsoft wouldn’t have to buy RIM to benefit, however the form factor of most blackberries really doesn’t seem like it would mesh well with windows phone 7 (which requires a large, multitouch touchscreen). Blackberry touchscreen devices have never been very strong, and I’m not sure much should be done about this. It is blackberries time to go.

Nokia is a company that can bring a lot of new things on the table. That’s a very innovative brand. Nokia goes very well with WP7. It gives the high quality hardware WP7 is currently missing. The partnership was a clever decision.

On the other hand Blackberry brings nothing new on the table. It’s a dying brand. Their devices are oldfashioned. They missed the multitouch screen revolution. Their interface is a real mess. Look at the Torch 9800. What a failure!

Building hardware for an os platform has never been a ms strategy. The reasoning has always been that at the scale that windows is sold, they could never create all the variety of hardware consumers would want, so they let their partners build the hardware instead and sell the os to them.

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