Investing

Will Microsoft Take Over RIM?

Research In Motion’s (NASDAQ: RIMM) board may have no other choice than to make a last-ditch effort to save the company through an alliance with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Reuters reports. Microsoft could make a large investment in RIM that may…

By Douglas A. McIntyre
Published June 29, 2012, 6:34am ET · 1 min read

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Research In Motion’s (NASDAQ: RIMM) board may have no other choice than to make a last-ditch effort to save the company through an alliance with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Reuters reports. Microsoft could make a large investment in RIM that may stop the nosedive of its shares. And the world’s largest software company has nearly unlimited technological and marketing capability. The cost of a relationship with Microsoft would be substantial. The software company almost certainly would force RIM to give up its own operating system, which it has used since the first BlackBerry was launched. In its place, RIM would use the Microsoft Windows mobile OS, which has struggled to gain adoption against Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android and Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) system.

Microsoft already has made an attempt to increase its mobile footprint through a joint venture with the world’s second largest handset company. But Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has had nearly as much trouble selling smartphones as RIM has. Microsoft also is attacking the mobile market with its own tablet PC. If Microsoft can coordinate these three efforts to get mobile adoption — RIM, Nokia and its Surface tablet — it might finally break though in the mobile sector.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

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Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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