A week will go by, one of these days, when we don’t hear rumors of RIM combining with another company. Unfortunately, that likely won’t happen until RIM actually does license BB10, does sell one of its divisions, or does realize success with the BB10 platform. That means a long stretch of non-news and speculation. In fact, this weekly news-of-the-week feature might as well be called Non-RIM-News, because rarely, if ever, do the stories involved have any actual impact on the company. John Paczkowski kicked things off earlier in the week with rumors of Samsung licensing BlackBerry 10. Then again, he didn’t really kick off anything except bringing Samsung’s name into the conversation. Just last week Thorstein Heins conducted an interview in which he said that licensing BlackBerry 10 is an option. Earlier this year I tried to make the case that licensing BlackBerry 10 is a good idea. I stand by it. And in any case, the speculation isn’t actually Paczkowski’s. It comes from Peter Misek of the analyst firm Jeffries. If I’ve learned anything covering RIM for BBGeeks its that analysts know little more than anyone else. They’re commenting from outside the company, and outside the industry really, so what they write amounts to little more than speculation. Maybe because they specialize in these types of companies they have slightly more information on which to base their guesses. But even then, that additional information might not lead to more accurate guesses. The point: while licensing might be a good idea, and while RIM could certainly pursue that avenue, the recent news alters that zero. Thorstein Heins’s statement in an interview to the Telegraph changes nothing. Peter Misek’s speculation, and John Paczkowski’s article don’t move the needle. My approval is less than meaningless in the overall picture. Every little bit here is with an aim to entertain and distract. It’s the sad reality surrounding basically every RIM rumor. We see this again with a recent Bloomberg story about IBM showing interest in RIM’s enterprise services unit. It uses “two people familiar with the situation” as sources. There’s no word whether these sources actually work for RIM or for IBM — and given the complete anonymity it might even come from analysts like Misek, meaning it’s third-hand information by the time Bloomberg publishes it. Again, the situation might make sense. RIM could better focus its operations by selling its enterprise services unit, and IBM seems like a logical fit. But the word of two completely anonymous sources who likely have no direct ties to RIM or IBM doesn’t change the story. In fact, if you read the story these anonymous sources reveal only that the enterprise services unit “has attract the interest” of IBM and that IBM “made an informal approach,” which might have been an IBM rep and a RIM rep with no decision-making power chatting over an informal lunch. Why even mention these stories if they mean nothing? Because it’s important to keep perspective. We deal with media blitzes, and the rush to publish obscures the truth. This is crucial for a company such as RIM, which has a lot riding on the events that will unfold in the next few months. For us consumers, it’s important to separate the non-news from the news. And to this point, pretty much everything we see in the media about RIM licensing and selling is non-news.
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