So RIM isn't RIM anymore. As of yesterday the company that made the phone I carried through most of grad school wants to be called BlackBerry, full stop, same as the product. They're switching the ticker too: RIMM becomes BBRY on the Nasdaq, RIM becomes BB up on the Toronto exchange. Thorsten Heins put out a statement calling it "the final step" in some larger transformation, which is the kind of sentence executives say right before the transformation doesn't happen.
I get the logic. Nobody outside of finance Twitter ever called it RIM anyway. Everybody just said "my BlackBerry," "check your BlackBerry," "no BBM on this thing?" The corporate name was always this weird formal layer sitting on top of a brand people actually used and, for a while, actually loved. So folding the company into the product name isn't crazy. It's just also not a strategy, and I think that's the part bugging me about it this morning.
I still have my old Bold in a drawer at home, the 9700, the one with the little optical trackpad that replaced the trackball because the trackball would get gunked up with pocket lint and start scrolling by itself. I used that phone for almost three years. Loved the keyboard, genuinely, in a way I've never loved a piece of glass. And I remember exactly when it stopped feeling relevant, which was sometime in 2011 when everyone around me started pulling out iPhones and the BBM "ping" sound stopped being the thing that got a table of people to all check their pockets at once.
Anyway. The actual news is that BB10 launches January 30th, two weeks from now, at an event in New York, and this rename is clearly meant to land right before that so the new phones ship under a name that isn't carrying five years of "isn't that the company that's dying" baggage. Whether it works depends entirely on the hardware and the app situation, not on what's printed on the earnings report. You can't rebrand your way out of a developer ecosystem problem. I say this as someone who watched Palm try something similar with webOS and, well.
I'll be honest, most of the tech conversation this week has understandably been about something much heavier than any of this. A lot of people I follow are still processing the news about Aaron Swartz, and rightly so, that's the story that actually matters right now, not a ticker symbol. I don't have anything smart to add there that hasn't already been said better by people who knew him. I just didn't want to write a whole post today pretending it's a normal week in tech like nothing happened, so: noted, and moving on to the small stuff, because the small stuff is what this blog has always been for.
Back to BlackBerry-the-company. What I'll actually be watching on the 30th isn't the name, it's whether BB10 has a real browser and whether the app situation is embarrassing or just okay. Enterprise IT departments will keep buying these things regardless of branding, because enterprise IT departments move at the speed of a glacier and half of them are still running BES servers they're scared to touch. That's the actual install base RIM — sorry, BlackBerry — is protecting here. Consumers mostly made their choice already, back around the time my trackpad started sticking.
One more thing and then I'm done: does anyone else find it a little funny that the joke used to be "RIM" as in the acronym is an unfortunate name for a phone company, and now they've just... removed the joke by deleting the acronym? Feels like solving the wrong problem, but maybe that's just me being seven years too attached to a keyboard that doesn't exist anymore.