Home Depot Picks Apple Over BlackBerry. Maybe, Just Maybe, It'll Be Sorry It Did

This in from Apple Insider: Home Depot has decided to supply its corporate staff with Apple’s iPhone 4S, ditching the some 10,000 BlackBerry smartphones its executives have used to date.

It’s a blow to RIM–sorry, BlackBerry–to be sure, especially following last year’s decision by the security-conscious Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to use the iPhone, over RIM. But it hardly spells the end for the company, which is just getting started pitching the BlackBerry Z10, a phone that is about as opposite of the iPhone than one can get and still be a smart device.

In fact it could well be that BlackBerry will look back at Home Depot’s decision as its turning point.

Oh, I am not going to jump on the Apple-is-losing-its-edge bandwagon or make some obscure connection between its recent stock price fluctuations to some fatal shift in its corporate or supply chain performance (and those rumors around the reductions in orders for iPhone screens, if true, probably stem from a solid reason like a change in product strategy).

But I do think RIM is scrappy enough to hold on to a core portion of its core user group—businesses—and then build from that base, especially with the rollout of BB 10. The message the market has been hammering home these last few years, innovate or die, has been duly received in Waterloo.

Perhaps more importantly BlackBerry’s also learned a key lesson about marketing, hopefully just in time. The company and the rest of the mobile world watched the Palm–a beautiful piece of hardware and software engineering that couldn’t sell itself out of a paper bag at the end–wither and die in large part because the devices weren’t marketed very well.  RIM almost went that route–and arguably it still could–but it seems to have finally found religion on marketing.

Along with the debut of its new OS, the company changed its name from RIM to BlackBerry.

It also announced it was creating a new role of Global Creative Director and that Grammy Award winner Alicia Keys would fill the job. I can’t really speak to Ms. Keys’ tech expertise and I have no idea just how much creative control she has in this arrangement. But the fact that BlackBerry saw fit to glam up its image with her speaks volumes. As for Apple, well, maybe I won’t flog its recent woes, but others sure are.

www.forbes.com