Depending on which report you were following, Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) or the tag team of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) were exploring the purchase of BlackBerry parent Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM) earlier this year.

RIM remains a tough nut to crack. The smartphone pioneer's odd co-CEO team topped a few lists of this year's worst CEO (or in RIM's case, CEOs). RIM closed out its latest quarter with a record 75 million subscribers, but revenue's slipping. Profitability is falling even faster.

Maybe this ends with a fire-sale acquisition, but RIM's arrogance hasn't helped guide it to a shareholder-relieving sale at higher price points as its stock cascades lower.

I'm not sure whether RIM will ever get it, until it's too late.

Briefly in the news
And now let's take a quick look at some of the other stories that shaped our week.

  • Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) will pay Mozilla $300 million a year to remain the default search-engine box on its Firefox browser. Who says real estate is cheap?
  • The value of Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings' stock options is being cut in half, but how is that fair when the share price has surrendered more than half of its price this year?
  • Sirius XM Radio (Nasdaq: SIRI) finally got FCC clearance for its Lynx receiver. It would be the second retail radio available under the satellite-radio giant's Sirius XM 2.0 platform, only this one may actually live up to the platform's new features.

Until next week, I remain,

Rick Munarriz