RIM Licensing Blackberry to Others?

By Thea Neuman (Google)

Finally, RIM’s CEO and President, Thorsten Heins has come up with a solution regarding its BB OS which lately became a subject of controversy, especially when Heins confessed that his company did think about discarding its own BB OS in favor of Android.

During a recent Interview with Telegraph, Heins talked about a few of the options regarding BB OS, on which RIM has been pondering over. Out of a few feasible options, one option can be licensing its upcoming BB OS to other mobile phone manufacturers. RIM now seems to understand the fact that once a decision has been made, there is no point in arguing over the toss, hence it’s better to take a little more time and come out with the best alternative.

Heins further revealed that his company may also join hands with other companies which will facilitate RIM in gearing up to face cut-throat competition.

Heins mentioned that, as it has become a known fact that his company is having a hard time dealing with multi-fold problems, time has come to adopt a more pragmatic and flexible approach. His statement was in context of the fact that his rivals are rolling out numerous mobile phones in a year because they do possess economy of scale while RIM can’t follow the same trend, because it believes in quality and not in quantity. All he meant was that his company believes in sticking to its focused platform rather than going astray.

He also stated that his company is exploring viable plans through which it can handover BB10 to those companies which can optimize the phone, keeping the same quality. However Heins didn’t reveal his concrete plans – all he talked about was a couple of alternatives regarding licensing BB 10 OS and chalking out feasible plans that can lead to profit maximization by reducing costs.

He also mentioned a possibility of RIM building up a reference system and then licensing the same to others so that they can fabricate its hardware. It could be either Blackberry or something different which is being built on the platform of BB but Heins made a clear point that RIM won’t give up its subscriber base.

The most intriguing question is that, when leading handsets manufacturers are already engaged with Android or Windows phone, how RIM will convince them to switch over from Android or others to BB OS.

It appears that Heins will never get tired of repeating that the journey doesn’t end here, but we all know that he himself doesn’t have any clue about what exactly is causing the current weakness which is hindering the company from bouncing back on sound growth path.

All he has to say in defense of his company is, they have sales of 45 million devices of single BB smartphone or 80 million global subscribers. But Mr. Heins, please pay attention to the wake up call because these figures may soon become an old chapter in history, and it is not a good thing to rest on laurels.

Heins is extremely confident about upcoming BB smartphone models and he is indicating that these new phones will prove to be a game-changer in the mobile industry and until the launch of these ambitious models, it is best not to make any wild guesses, so let’s just hope that what Heins is predicting, turns out to be true.