BlackBerry 10 signals new round in smartphone war

This is the debut edition of Signposts, Arthur Goldstuck’s new weekly column for the Sunday Times Business Times. It is archived in The Big Change a week after appearing in print.

On 30 January 2013, BlackBerry served notice that it had rejoined the smartphone wars.

The spotlight was on the first phone sporting its new BlackBerry 10 operating system, the Z10. But, between the scripted lines of the launch event, the company formerly known as Research in Motion (RIM) sent out many signals of a newly fortified brand.

On the surface, the Z10 is merely a high-end device playing catch-up with all the high-end devices from rivals like Apple and its iPhone 5, Samsung with the Galaxy S III, and Nokia armed with its Lumia 920. These three phones also happen to run on the three major rival operating systems, respectively Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows 8 Mobile.

The older BlackBerry 7 operating system, which underpins the current ranges of Curve, Bold and Torch phones, could never be mentioned seriously in this company. The founders and former joint CEOs of RIM, Michale Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, would not bring themselves to admit it – one of many reasons they needed to step aside and make way for the current CEO, Thorsten Heins

While his predecessors had paved the way for BlackBerry 10, Heins instantly set about changing the way the organization thinks about its customers and its technology. One of the many outcomes of his new-broom approach was the announcement, on Wednesday night, that the RIM brand would be killed off, and the company would henceforth be known by the same name as its core brand, BlackBerry.

Symbolically, the new branding buried RIM’s recent past and its one-time culture of attempting to dictate to customers what it thought best for the market.

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