With Research in Motion's failure to find its footing in an ever-changing mobile landscape, rumors of the company's potential buyout have been common over the past two years. Recently, Samsung denied rumors of plans to purchase RIM. New rumors have now surfaced about potential plans from IBM.

Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that IBM was in acquisition talks with RIM regarding the company's enterprise section. The report gave no indication of how the BlackBerry maker might respond to such an offer. Some in the industry have suggested that RIM might want to wait and see how well BlackBerry 10 performs on the market before seriously considering a buyout offer. Selling the enterprise section of the company alone could be a bad move for Research In Motion. If RIM later chose to sell the whole company, the missing enterprise section would lower the asking price.

The best prospect for RIM at this point is for BlackBerry 10 to perform well when the first set of devices make their way to consumer hands in 2013. Success with the new platform may not be easy, since Google and Apple have created a choke point in the market, challenging anyone else's successful entry.

A recent move by Nokia dealt another blow to RIM's comeback plans. The rival company acquired Scalado, the developer behind BlackBerry 10's amazing time warping camera feature. Nokia stated that the company has no plans to license Scalado technology to anyone but that it must honor RIM's previous license deal with Scalado. This means that after RIM's license agreement is up, the time warping camera feature will be missing from BlackBerry 10 devices.

Recently, RIM announced plans to layoff 5000 workers in order to save $1 billion by the end of 2013 fiscal year. Laying off workers to save cash may be a warning sign about the company's future.