5 reasons why Facebook should buy RIM

Facebook, always the life of the social media bad boy party, is on quite a roll these days.

Claiming it wanted to drive more users to take advantage of its fancy new messaging services, Facebook took it upon itself to change the default contact email address of millions of users to their facebook.com addresses. To make a bad situation worse, that change generated an additional headache for smartphone users who had set up their devices to auto-sync contacts with their Facebook accounts. Countless messages were lost after emails were sent to facebook.com inboxes that hadn't been activated.

This isn't exactly how Facebook, wrestling with weak post-IPO share values, is going to win friends in the executive suite.

Yet the company could make all of this go away in one fell swoop: Either buy a piece of Research In Motion or initiate some form of partnership with the beleaguered BlackBerry maker.

Sure, it sounds far-fetched. But for a chronically misbehaving company that often wonders why it can't get more respect, a leap like this would do wonders to repair its tarnished image. Here's why:

1 — Enterprise credibility

No one takes Facebook seriously, and for good reason. We status update, we poke, we tend FarmVille crops, and we complain about Timeline. But we don't see Facebook as a real player with an actual business plan that companies can trust as a long-term vendor-partner. It's like Nintendo trying to get a meeting with the CEO and CIO: It'll never happen.

A RIM hookup would instantly give Facebook the kind of enterprise credibility it desperately needs as it tries to identify and pursue future revenue growth and convince investors it's for real. The heavily consumer-focused Facebook would benefit from RIM's corporate-friendly halo — which would in turn give it the credibility to move social media more firmly into corporate circles. Microsoft's $1.2 billion acquisition of Yammer is a huge bet that enterprise social networking is the new holy grail. If Facebook fails to become more corporate-friendly, it could find itself on the outside looking in.

2 — Privacy

Facebook is no overachiever in privacy, confidentiality and security. Its internal culture, geared toward providing an open platform that drives social interaction, often seems at odds with personal and organizational requirements to keep data under control. Despite repeated run-ins with government agencies — including, famously, Canada's Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart — Facebook continues to force negative-option settings changes on its users.

A RIM partnership would help the company erase the stigma of years of doing the wrong thing and allow it to build trust relationships with corporate decision-makers who don't take kindly to vendors that play roulette with customer data.

3 - Mobility

Facebook has a firmly Web-based legacy. Launched in 2004, it grew up long before mobility took over as a primary means of accessing online services. As a result, it's struggled to mobilize its model: Its mobile apps have been slow to appear, and are often buggy and feature-thin when they do. Worse, they fail to monetize mobile use as effectively as the traditional browser-based interfaces do.

Unlike Apple and Google, who have built robust ecosystems around their solutions, a software-only Facebook has no control over the mobile end user experience. Its future remains murky if it doesn't manage to make the leap into owning a greater chunk of the so-called stack — hardware, software, network — that delivers online services to mobile users.

4 — Hardware

Everyone's jumping on the build-your-own-hardware bandwagon as a critical marketing move to reinforce vertical integration — and control the end user experience and advertising revenues that result. Facebook is already deeply into a project to develop its own smartphone. A RIM deal would move it forward that much more quickly by allowing it to bypass the treacherous early stages of building support for an entirely new platform.

RIM's platform is already well established, and leveraging what's already there would also allow Facebook to differentiate its offering more effectively, as it wouldn't simply be just another me-too Android device.

5 — Subscription revenue/diversification

The company makes money from advertising - $3.7 billion last year - but not enough to satisfy shareholders and drive growth. Questions over Facebook's ability to improve its advertising revenue batting average largely explain its weak share value performance since the IPO.

RIM's services arm made about $4 billion last year in subscription revenue - a more stable longer-term source that, with appropriate licensing, can grow tremendously once the platform is opened up beyond just BlackBerrys.

To be fair, any form of Facebook-RIM deal opens up huge issues of culture and compatibility. The Hatfields and McCoys might stand a better chance. But with RIM flailing and Facebook looking for ways to cement its relevance and prevent a mySpace-like flameout into irrelevance, the potential for these two opposites to attract and create differential value could be too compelling to ignore.

Carmi Levy is a London, Ont.-based independent technology analyst and journalist. The opinions expressed are his own. carmilevy@yahoo.ca