Microsoft, Amazon and Nokia are looking into acquiring Research in Motion (RIM), which has suffered a torrid year of outages, late products and lost market share, according to separate reports.
Separately, Reuters is reporting that Amazon hired an investment banker over the summer to explore buying RIM, but that a formal offer was never made. The two companies do already work together, on such arrangements as providing Amazon's music service to BlackBerry users.
The talk is that RIM wants to stay independent, though 2012 is already a huge concern in that the company has said it will delay by months, until late next year, the release of phones based on its new QNX operating system. The company is still banking on its enterprise network strengths, and is making moves such as extending its expertise in mobile device management to Android and Apple iOS devices, to turn things around.
IDG News Service