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Comment by shareme | Hacker News Reader

Is it not time for MS to buy another mobile OS company?

MSQNX coming to a phone near you...

MSQNX, no. "Windows Phone with Blackberry Security"? Maybe.

MS could actually do a lot worse than pick up some Blackberry stuff to improve their enterprise offering with WP. If it means getting Blackberry Messenger too, then all the better.

Totally agree - buy RIM, ditch the Blackberry phones, take BBM onto WP7, and use the infrastructure RIM has developed as an enterprise backbone for WP7 with MS-exchange. They'd need to decentralize it a bit, as the network architecture is a bit vulnerable at the moment, but it could be done.

My guess is that if MS is considering this they'll wait until RIM hits rock bottom.

RIM are major contributors to the WebKit project. If they switched to Windows Phone, it would likely be a major initiative to build a WebKit browser on that platform (would likely require a special build of the OS to bake it completely in. Or they could get rid of some of their most talented people. Neither seems very likely to me.

RIM is still known for making attractive hardware. Their best bet is trying to accelerate the Web as the application platform. Joining in with Mozilla's WebAPI initiative would be wise.

You could (and people did) say the same thing about Nokia, though. If RIM was involved in some sort of sale to MS, staff cuts would absolutely be on the table- so actually, ditching WebKit could be convenient.

I don't think that would be a good move for Microsoft. RIM would cost them probably $10B at least. What do they get out of it? They can't really back-port WP7 to the existing BB devices for a quick market-share grab. They don't want QNX. They don't need RIMs enterprise software. They would be spending $10B or more to layoff 90% of the company and throw away most of their existing software & hardware. Microsoft would be better off just doing another Nokia style deal with RIM.

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