Today's appointment of Thorsten Heins to the position of president and CEO is not the equivalent of Nokia hiring Stephen Elop. In fact, this isn't even the equivalent of Meg Whitman coming in to repair the damage left in Leo Apotheker's wake. Rather, RIM appears to have adopted a business-as-usual attitude with the appointment of Heins, and in case you were wondering, business hasn't exactly been booming over at RIM in the past few years.

Consider that shares of RIM were trading at $70 a little less than a year ago, in February of 2011. As I write this, RIM is trading at $15.91 per share, down 6 percent since the announcement of Thorsten Heins yesterday. This is to say nothing about RIM's plummeting market share, nor the established competition that is no doubt applauding RIM's decision to stay its treacherous course.

Remember Elop's famous memo about the man hanging from a burning oil platform above the frigid waters of the North Atlantic? Elop's first order of business was to explain to everyone that Nokia, as a company, was about to let go and brave those harsh waters. Nokia did let go of MeeGo (and in part, Symbian) and appears to have found a life raft in the form of Windows Phone 7.

I wonder if RIM thinks it is so different than Nokia that it can continue to hold onto a platform on fire?

Perhaps it's just that RIM thinks it has the fire under control. Perhaps the new hardware under wraps, when combined with the impending release of BB 10 and PlayBook 2.0, along with a few Android apps, really will re-inspire the BlackBerry faithful. Perhaps we're about to see the exact opposite of what Nokia did.

I have a hard time believing that’s what we’re going to see, if only because RIM’s previous recent attempts to really impress have largely failed. BlackBerry 7 was supposed to be the next evolutionary step for RIM, and still it hemorrhaged market share. The PlayBook was supposed to be the next stop in tablet computing; it was released sans 3G or native email, an embarrassing apps catalog and is now seeing deep discounts.

I might be more optimistic if Heins did send out a come-to-reality memo like the one issued by Elop, shortly after his hiring. But alas, Heins thinks things are right on track.
“I don't think that there is a drastic change needed,” he said in a call with reporters earlier this morning.

What? Excuse me, but isn’t this the point in the movie where the incoming CEO should be seen angrily dumping a box of Android and iOS devices (heck, throw in a Lumia 900) onto a conference room table for all of his top designers and R&D folks to see, while said CEO screams, “THIS IS WHAT THE COMPETITION IS DOING! WE NEED TO BE DOING THE SAME OR BETTER!”

I think it was Albert Einstein who said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I’m beginning to wonder whether this particular definition might apply to a certain OEM from the North Country.