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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I highly doubt that MS will be the party to bite. BB uses a customized QnX that is about as far away from Windows Phone as you could probably go without doing something really exotic.

If that were their route they'd have to drop their investment in QnX, try to adapt all BB software to run under the latest incarnation of Windows Phone rather than to just run Windows Phone on it. BB users are quite particular about their handsets & associated software, much more so than Nokia users ever were.

Of course this could be totally wrong but I think the challenges in moving BB to Windows Phone are far more substantial than to get Nokia to convert even if BB is a smaller player.

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> If that were their route they'd have to drop their investment in QnX

Just as Nokia had to drop their investment in Symbian and Maemo

> BB users are quite particular about their handsets

However they're not particular about BB10 (the QNX one you mention) since most of them aren't even running it. If anything, the fact that they're in the middle of a delicate platform shift makes the parallels with Nokia in 2011 all the more striking.

Anyway, its all just idle speculation on my part.

That's a good point. Ok, so maybe MS would be the one to bite. If only to beat out a potential competitor to windows phone and to pick up that slice of the market.

Consider me convinced, that might just work out well for them, if they're going to switch anyway it might as well be to a company that is already well represented in the enterprise. How they're going to give those users the blackberry experience is beyond me though, but that would probably not stop an acquisition.

Nokia is getting $250 million each quarter from Microsoft, minus the price of the OS licenses, minus the foregone revenue from supplying Nokia Maps for free to non-Nokia Windows Phones.

With 7.4 million Lumias sold last quarter, at $25 per Windows Phone license, Nokia is drawing just $70 million each quarter from Microsoft. At 10 million units, they'd start paying Microsoft money.

Blackberry sold 6.8 million units last quarter. They have no maps to license to Microsoft. If they signed an agreement with Microsoft tomorrow, it'd still take several months for the first handset to come out. What would Blackberry be worth to Microsoft in a year?

The numbers are not in Blackberry's favor. That having been said, I will never underestimate Steve Ballmer's ability to overpay for a deal.

main asset that Blackberry has right now is BBM, their messaging infrastructure. I fear the hardware and BB10 operating system will not make it

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