Blackberry in ex-Sybase John Chen's hands

[former_member184221]

An interesting day yesterday with me waiting to see who would bid for Blackberry. Imagine my surprise when it turned out no one wanted them, and instead they appointed my old Boss from Sybase John Chen as executive chairman and interim Chief executive.

Previous to this appointment I was secretly thinking that Samsung might buy Blackberry for its OS and patents, But is seems all the contenders stepped back - Founders Mike and Doug; Prem Warsa; Samsung; Lenovo;Microsoft; Google; Facebook; IBM; Cisco. None put a bid in to my surprise. There was even a rumour that John Sculley ex Apple was a potential bidder with some Canadian investors.

Interesting lots of Google references this morning saying "who is John Chen". well from my point of view he is a Man who knows how to turn a loss making company around by imposing very tight cost control. That's what he did to Sybase, indeed some would say SUP was created as a MEAP simply to aid Sybase being bought by SAP. Whatever you think about John, and I have biased opinions on that one, he did successfully turn Sybase around and sell it to SAP. Which was good for Sybase, good for SAP and good for John.

So I think John Chen is exactly what Blackberry need at this moment, it will be interesting to see what happens next.

SAP - do you need a Mobile Phone company ?