We often hear rumblings about Research In Motion (RIM) potentially licensing its BlackBerry 10 OS to other manufacturers. In a recent interview, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins flat out said that his company is looking into this option, which would provide an additional revenue stream and allow BlackBerry to compete on a larger scale.
Of course, if RIM does eventually go this route, it won’t stop manufacturing its own BlackBerry devices. “We will not abandon the subscriber base,” said Heins. “You could think about us building a reference system, and then basically licensing that reference design, have others build the hardware around it – either it’s a BlackBerry or it’s something else being built on the BlackBerry platform.”
The challenge, of course, would be convincing other manufacturers to get on board, not to mention overcoming the recent wave of negativity surrounding the BlackBerry brand. RIM hopes to improve things with its BlackBerry 10 OS, but the Waterloo-based company was recently forced to delay it until early 2013. Could RIM succeed in licensing its OS? Only time will tell.
