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Trademark Trouble For RIM Over New "BBX" Name
AZA43 writes "As if its latest BlackBerry service outage--the worst in company history--and the mass exodus of BlackBerry users to iOS and Android weren't bad enough, RIM is now facing a potential trademark lawsuit over the name of its next generation BlackBerry OS: BBX. The BBX announcement was the most significant news to come from RIM's BlackBerry Developer Conference this week, and now it looks like RIM may have change the upcoming platform's name to something else. RIM just can't seem to do anything right these days."
I mean, come on people - you could hire a fucking INTERN for $10 an hour to look and see if there's any prior art or previous use of the term BBX, and I'm pretty sure that even if the kid isn't that bright or skilled, after about a week, they would have been able to give some kind of a thumbs up/down on this. This is just GLARING incompetence and mind boggling arrogance on the part of RIM.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
BBNX isn't so bad. Why don't they trademark names before they announce them?
did you forget to take your meds?
Just don't call it BBeOS or anything I guess.
The name "BBX" is so full of life, emotion, and positive energy, it will be tragic for RIM if they can't use it. Why, just to pronounce it: B-B-X, sends shivers of joy down my spine. B-B-X: it just perfectly encapsulates everything that a smartphone should be. How sad that it is already taken. Someone else has already captured the sultry, sexy, BBX.
LOL
RIM
I mean, c'mon, do a google search before you name a flagship product, at least check to see if the name has already been used.
The BBx folks (company name BASIS) have been around for over 25 years and have many thousands of sites using their products in the US, Eurozone, and the far east. A large VAR base and some great new products built with Java that run almost anywhere, from server to PC to hand held phone or tablet..
Maybe the RIM folks think they'll get away with it because they're bigger ?
They just can't catch a break, can they?
But the complainant has clearly been using the BBx name long before RIM. It's even a technology purposed product. They're justified in defending their trademark -- it's how the system is supposed to work.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I guess we should get new RIM jobs
...RIM's product is the best, therefore, "BBKing". Further posts are unnecessary.
I'm not going to say that picking a good name to brand your products is not a very important thing-nor that one shouldn't invest the proper amount of resources to properly secure it and make sure it's unique in the market you're aiming for. But I really wish some of these articles weren't so slanted against RIM. I know it's all the rage these days to kick them when they are down, especially when they are in this transition period where they are moving towards a new platform and some of the issues they've had-just makes me a little sad.
http://devblog.blackberry.com/2011/10/open-source-playbook-os/?CPID=TWDDevCon
As some people on the CrackBerry forums have said, "I could care less if they called it FROG OS" because it finally looks like RIM is starting to deliver on the promises they've put forward for the new platform. It almost looks to be the most open platform available now, where it offers several different options for developers to use. With both the WebWorks API for both BlackBerry OS and the Playbook OS or the Adobe AIR/Flex/Flash API, and now finally the NDK with a very focused porting of Open Source libraries.
And the kicker? The one thing that everyone has been saying that RIM can't pull off? You can take an Android .apk and repackage it as an PlayBook .bar file all without looking at the code just need to run a couple of commands and then side load it onto a PlayBook and then use that application right now with the OS 2.0 Developers Beta.
So... maybe they are going to have issues with BBX name.. If they have to change it? So what, it's not like it matters, because they are finally giving people what they wanted. A real development environment to target for their current and upcoming devices and platforms. They didn't seem to think so: http://crackberry.com/official-staement-rim-regarding-basis-claim-bbx-trademark
Keep in mind this is all based upon QNX which has an amazing history and is used in a lot more things then people realize. I cannot wait to see what will come of this, even if they take a massive beating on the way down. We've seen giants fall and return again. It's like karma after all.
Why wouldn't you just name it outright and use the acronym when discussing it instead. You don't have to pay anyone for using an acronym/abbreviation for your products actual full name.
Specifically Basis Technology, a Cambridge MA vendor of globalization and linguistic software and services that's been around since 1995 (BTW that was the outfit I thought of when I saw the summary).
Isn''t that even more confusing for potential customers?
It would be so fitting.
Their product isn't even called BBx anymore. They call it BBj so I don't understand why their customers would be confused. http://www.basis.com/bbj
If BBX is supposed to be a combination of BlackBerry and QNX (BBX), and they can't use it, then they should just name it BlackBerry and QNX (BBQ).
Might be catchy; "Hey, I'll BBQ you later!"
What's wrong with BBQ? This is what happens when companies get to be a certain size, then every product decision leads to "Oh no, some pundit might make fun of that or people could take it the wrong way."
"As if its latest BlackBerry service outage--the worst in company history--and the mass exodus of BlackBerry users to iOS and Android weren't bad enough, RIM is now facing a potential trademark lawsuit over the name of its next generation BlackBerry OS: BBX. The BBX announcement was the most significant news to come from RIM's BlackBerry Developer Conference this week, and now it looks like RIM may have change the upcoming platform's name to something else. RIM just can't seem to do anything right these days."
Who cares what they call their OS? I don't base my OS selection on name, but rather on performance.
This article is the tech-equivalent of critiquing the merits of what outfit Kim Kardashian wore out last weekend.
This quarter, actually. It makes sense if you think about it.
Nobody in the world has ever fucking heard of the other BBX before.
I've fucking heard of BBx! I'm surprised it still exists. I can't believe there's a fucking Thoroughbred Basic for Vista. At least MAI Basic Four, Micro Five, and Microshare seem to have fallen by the wayside.
But JHFCoaS, nothing says "stuck in the '70s" like BBx. Oy!
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Well the search term BBX sure brings up some interesting hits.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
RIM recently announced the up-coming launch of the "Electronic Personal Interconnected Communications and Fully Automated Interconnecting Lan". The EPICFAIL is set to be the mainstay of RIM's business until section 11 is reached early in 2015.
Microsoft's money is offshore. But it's not in Canada. They need to assimilate Skype and Yahoo first anyway. RIM is just going to hang in there 'till 2013 if they're waiting for Microsoft to buy them.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
From here, I can hear Mike Lazaridis' and Jim Balsillie's moms singing Soft kitty while rubbing their respectives chests.
Achille Talon
Hop!
And Apple had to deal with Cisco and IOS. It's just a name. What really matters is that they own QNX and the OS itself.
Publicity play. Can anyone please tell me.... ...if the extra publicity makes you any more likely to program in Business BASIC or for the BlackBerry?
I worked for a company that provided terminal emulation software for use by BBX on Xenix machines (among other places). While I'm not as surprised as some people to hear they are still around in some form, both companies are now marginal at best.
I wonder how many people cashed in their $100 worth of free applications for BlackBerry after their (effectively) global outage? I think they are quickly losing relevance to just about everyone at this point.
-- Terry
If you don't defend trademarks, you can end up losing them. Therefore if a company sees a possible trademark dilution, they have to make some effort to defend it. What in reality will probably happen is that there will be some kind of negotiation between the companies, an agreement signed, and Blackberry will use BBX, as will the original company; they'll just agree not to move into each other's areas.
The thing though that cracks me up about these cases is the talk of customers being confused. A couple of years ago, SPARC International ceased and desisted SparkFun Electronics because SparkFun was confusingly similar to SPARC, and that SPARC's customers might get confused. I saw this as an enormous insult to the intelligence of SPARC's customers. They aren't room temperature IQ drooling cretins (as SPARC's law firm seems to think), SPARC's customers are generally pretty intelligent and will never get confused between SPARC and SparkFun. SparkFun and SPARC ended up making an agreement, no money changed hands.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I like how $100 of apps on the BlackBerry is like $10 on any other app store
My company used to use BBx extensively and still associate Basis with that product, so their claim is quite real.
They had a BBx operating system as well, it think BASIS Intl bought it from them.
Having used it, I can tell you is was pretty horrible, not that this is a factor.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Having fought these battles, this is a nothing. They will simply call it "RIM BBX" and so long as they use RIM in front of it, it avoids confusion. Not to mention they aren't selling to the same markets (and in fact I don't think BBX is being sold on its own).
The iPhone trademark had been filed in the 90s by a company that Cisco bought in 2000. The trademark hadn't been used in a phone since 2001, and had expired, except it was in an extended period when Cisco could still renew it by paying an extra fee.
To renew it, Cisco had to show the trademark was currently in use in commerce. The proof would be a photo of the retail packaging sent to the USPTO. So Cisco literally took an existing Linksys VOIP phone box, slapped an "iPhone" sticker on it, and sent that to the USPTO. In short, Cisco committed fraud to retrieve their abandoned trademark now that it had value to Apple.
Cisco didn't even start selling this re-labeled phone as an iPhone until AFTER Apple had been in negotiations with Cisco over the technically expired trademark. Cisco didn't really have a case, which is why they settled for a vague promise of "interoperability."
Basis was formed by 3 refugees from MAI/Basic Four (I was one of the 2 tech guys). The main product of Basic Four was something of an integrated environment - the shell was the language Business Basic and immediately executed the BB commands given to it. At the time of development it really was handy and well designed - it had device independent operations for display and printing, pretty decent file handling, etc. Handy enough that we were able to write good business applications. Later versions had additional capability - external called subroutines, background tasks, etc. Programs were self modifiable, the best use of that was in a program editor from an outfit in Cleveland (hi Len!). I was involved in writing an office automation package package - appointment scheduler, email, text editor, etc. all in the language - so it was reasonably capable for something in those pre-graphics days.
In the process of developing the office automation the terminal was the big problem, so we worked with an outfit to build a compatible terminal with some extensions so the text editor could be a little more WYSIWYG. They later added another board to make it a nice little micro computer and we figured that it might make a nice little workstation, and we developed a version of Business BASIC for it. It was pretty compatible with Basic Four's BB, a lot of applications could be pulled straight across and run (since the language was interactive the compiled form of code looked more like a reversible bytecode translation and thus was "run anywhere"). It even had the external shared code, background processing, etc. I wouldn't call it much of an operating system but it was on a Z80 and ran standard Business Basic applications very well, even multi-user with an external terminal.
That gained the attention of MAI - office automation and a copy of Basic Four's environment running on 10x less expensive hardware - they ended up buying the company we worked for and calling it Basic Four Business Products and had us producing cut-down versions of the accounting software MAI was selling at the time. Naturally, there was more than a little antipathy between the BF and BFBP groups (as well as some missteps from BFBP management) and after a couple of years the BF group got the BFBP group dissolved.
At that point 3 of the former BFBP folks (I'm one of them) got together and formed Basis and wrote BBx. I'm pretty sure the name was never used before, we didn't want to get too close to any BF names but still wanted to include "Business Basic" in the name. Didn't help, they sued us anyway (took some 6 years to resolve in federal court) but the BBx product was not an operating system but more like a shell with an integrated language. A claim I found ludicrous was that we had somehow 'stolen' trade secrets - heck, they'd bought us at least partially because of our ability to duplicate their product and they were never able to show any of their secrets flowing out of BF to BFBP or us (my recollection is that they really fought us on any issue we asked about). The whole process left me burned out and I left in 1995.
Relative to the tools and such available today it's not an easy environment to work in. I think folks have done some stuff in developing an IDE but I'm not current with anything in the BB world. But you have to remember that the base for the environment was developed when memory was $1/byte and came as ferrite doughnuts strung on wires and the language got a bit locked on that environment. Even while I appreciate what I can do with a nice IDE I miss the environment where I could scratch up a 10 line program in minutes that actually did something useful.
There is no mass exodus to iPhone / Android. Stop spreading hysteria/fud.
RIM is doing reasonably well and only will improve over the next few years. Their products are actually quite good, though the media continues to give it lukewarm reception. There are many shortcomings of iPhone that BB excels at (I would know, I own both devices).
As of right now, there is no replacement for BlackBerry. No other phone is as secure AND gives its users such fine-grained control over firewall and other app access to its resources.
While marketed as a "platform," BBx combines an old version of Basic (Business Basic from the 1980's) that runs on a pseudo PICK O/S environment which in turn runs under Solaris, Linux, and Windows.
Basis International developed BBj as the "next generation" of BBx that would move from Basic to Java back in the days when everyone thought Java would take over the world.
To the dismay of Basis, thousands of older customers have been perfectly happy not to migrate their commercial legacy apps off of BBx.
In other words, they WISH they had put BBx to "sleep" years ago, but have been unsuccessful. (Sounds like a lot of COBOL shops.)
What RIM has done is to use a trademark that among BBx customers means old, creaky language who vendor doesn't even like it much any more.
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
lol did they every do anything right? EVER?
.....They should rename it Quickster.