Blackberry announced officially its plan to find buyers 3 days ago and Robin Chan a tech venture capital investor decided to publish his forgotten coup plan.

1 year ago, Robin — who has assisted in funding Twitter, Square and Foursquare, among others tech start ups — made a secret take over plan that would have redeemed BlackBerry from its plunge into despond.

"BBX" was the name of the plan: Chan planned on selling this idea to a few heads and raising $6 million before approaching RIM with the idea. The plan was just about cutting a lot of edges and simplifying the company.

This BBX — could have changed BlackBerry's management and system, and subsequently dump the phone's operating system. As replacement, Chan planed to make what he called android 'fork', a version of Android embodying some of BlackBerry's own functionality and styling inside. This would save the company development costs, and please employees who preferred Android over Blackberry.

He felt that moving the company to a customer tier which was highly in demand was the best way to go. Chan sited that RIM missed out on massive ecosystem shift centered around app development due to its inability to adapt swiftly new paradigms, such as touchscreens and app ecosystems such as google and apple. That RIM's dominance was threathened as most company employees began bringing apple and android based devices to work. That RIMS products was having outages and developers are porting to platfoms such as google and apple.

At the time Chan launched his plan, RIM had slipped to an eight year low but the company's CEO Thorsten Heins had refuted that RIM was in troubled waters. Chan outlined the the strengths of blackberry in that it has a bunch of assets that android or iOS did not. He also mentioned that one of RIM's big issues were some of their execs who were ill qualified for the posts which they held.
Tom Moss, former head of business development for Android, posted to Chan on Facebook that the plan could have actually worked ... with some tweaks and that what he suggested might even still be possible today.

But pitiable, no one bought the idea of this plan.

http://thebusinessaim.com/rims-blackberry-a-story-of-missed-opportunities-and-the-secret-coup-that-failed/