Raise your hand if you had one of these! Now put that hand down because you’re reading this online and you look silly. (photo: Ninja M.)
Let’s flash back to 2007, when every hotshot businessperson on the go click-click-clicked away on their Blackberry. Maybe they even had one with a really nice color screen and a scrollwheel that didn’t break after a few months. Fast-forward to now, when anyone still carrying a Blackberry gets pelted with spoiled meats and exiled to a rocky island in the Delaware River where they watch VHS tapes and dial into AOL. And yet, Samsung is reportedly thinking about paying billions of dollars to buy Blackberry.
This is according to Reuters, who reports that Korean electronics giant Samsung may be willing to pay upwards of $7.5 billion to acquire Blackberry, mostly to snatch up the company’s patents.
Company bigwigs met up last week to chat about the possibility of a merger, which could pay Blackberry shareholders somewhere between $13.35 and $15.49 per share, significantly higher than the sub-$11 price the company had been trading at recently. (News of the possible merger sent shares soaring today from $9.32 to a 52-week high of more than $12.60.)
Just for fun, let’s look at Blackberry’s share price for the last decade and a half:
by Chris Morran via Consumerist