What significance does this have? Well, as an outsider who has been watching this firm for much of the past decade, I can say: "plenty."
As I've said to anyone who has asked my opinion of the company in the last several years: RIM has been a great developer of revolutionary devices and systems:
1. the voice pager,
2. the two-way text pager,
3. the BlackBerry e-mail device and supporting systems.
They have, however, faltered each and every time it came to evolving these technologies before the competition. Once they had developed the voice pager, others (e.g. Motorola) came along and improved upon that to create the numeric and alphanumeric pager systems. And who wouldn't see that as an improvement over the loud beep from a voice pager followed by a practically unintelligible noise that was your caller's "voice"? Of course, the folks at RIM were still young and able to roll with the punches... they came out with another revolutionary product: the two-way text pager. Unfortunately, because of their inability to adopt the intermediate stage, they had an uphill battle to face against the competing network models that Motorola and other large players were producing.
This two-way text pager was what heralded the way for the BlackBerry. Once Internet e-mail had caught-on, this device became ubiquitous with the enterprise's mobile workforce. Unfortunately, this is where their evolutionary abilities ended.
You see, the first few BlackBerrys were e-mail only devices -- you still had to pack a separate device to use for voice communication, despite the fact that they both used the same networks and very similar radios. Furthermore, they were tied to large enterprise that had deployed both a Microsoft Exchange mail server and bought in to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) -- neither of which were affordable for the SMB and personal user marketspace.
Along came HandSpring (later purchased by Palm) with the Treo lineup of integrated communication devices. These devices could be used with virtually any e-mail system and had both voice and data capabilities. Strangely enough, people were still buying BlackBerrys.
Over the next several years, we saw some evolutionary devices that offered different abilities to communicate with SMS (text messaging) and e-mail, but none of them were great. Many even added web browsers, but they all offered an experience that was so far below what a person could get at their desk that they were handy but not overly useful.
Then comes 2007. Apple releases the first iPhone. Some might call this device revolutionary, but I don't believe it deserves that title. It was really the perfect evolution of what all these other devices should have been (and everyone knew it), but no one seemed able to deliver. Until now.
Let's not kid ourselves -- Apple has not shown us any revolutionary products in the past decade and a half. Of course, you could argue: "what about the iPod?" -- nope, not revolutionary. The iPod simply took devices like Creative Labs' Nomad MP3 player and gave them mass-market appeal. "The iPhone, then?" no, again! The touchscreen interface was nice, but not something that qualified it as revolutionary -- it just brought the system to a mass-market.
"Well, then, how about the iPad? Surely that was revolutionary!" still no. The tablet form factor has been around since before 2005. The iPad simply put a nice face on it, added the iOS secret sauce that everyone was familiar with and -- you guessed it -- mass-marketed it.
So where does that leave us with RIM, erm, BlackBerry?
Well, that's a good question. As a Canadian, my patriotic sense wants me to support a Canadian company like RIM. And, if they hadn't shown themselves to be as haughty as they have in believing that their current systems were the best, it might stand a chance. But another competitor has come along to be neck-and-neck with Apple. And that is Android. Over the past few years, the technology news articles have stopped talking about "Apple vs. BlackBerry" and are now talking about "Apple vs. Android". This shows a clear shift in the feelings of the marketplace -- BlackBerry is no longer a major player.
Of course, this rebranding that RIM has just undergone marks the death knell for a company that once defined revolutionary. The idea that RIM is now "BlackBerry" says to me that they have decided that all their eggs belong in one basket -- the BlackBerry system. It is a last-ditch effort for a company that continues to find ways of underwhelming both the marketplace and the stock market.
Perhaps they will still manage to revolutionise some element of technology and will find a rebirth. More than likely, however, is that they will find themselves bought up by Apple, Google, or another big company and eventually forced into oblivion -- a line note in technology history -- much like the aforementioned HandSpring and Palm systems referenced earlier.
I'm betting you've already forgotten I mentioned those.
