Poor RIM. The maker of the BlackBerry smartphone has seen its market share steadily decline, and its attempt to engage in the tablet wars have been largely underwhelming to this point. Now, on top of
that -- which more significantly has pushed RIM's stock price down into the range of its five-year low as of today -- the company has had to abandon the BBX name it gave it new operating system in October due to a trademark suit. It seems some small software company in New Mexico had already trademarked BBX, and a temporary restraining order was issued to prevent RIM from using BBX.
So now its next-generation operating system will henceforth be known as BlackBerry10, which the company says “reflects the significance of the new platform and will leverage the global strength of the BlackBerry brand while also aligning perfectly with RIM’s device branding.” BBX, of course, was the company's attempt to tie BlackBerry to the underlying QNX operating system on which it is based.
Blackberry's 52-week high was over $70; it was trading today at about $16.81. It has bigger fish to fry, frankly, than the name of its operating system.