Somebody out there probably still holds shares of Nortel Networks. It’s really nothing to be ashamed of. I logged into an account I had been ignoring to find 29 shares next to the following listing: BORDERS GROUP MICHIGAN INC NO STOCKHOLDERS' EQUITY 01/12/2012. Stuff happens.
That said, I can only hope the volume I see come in on Nortel each day does not represent a fresh long play or some pathetic attempt to average down. Even Nortel itself advises investors to stay away:
As previously announced, Nortel does not expect that the company’s common shareholders or the NNL preferred shareholders will receive any value from the creditor protection proceedings and expects that the proceedings will result in the cancellation of these equity interests.
It would not shock me to see that boilerplate come from Nokia or Research in Motion at some point over the next couple to a few years. At this juncture, both stocks represent highly speculative plays. Each company requires wholesale change or something else extraordinary to take place in the absence of such a turnaround if it expects to, once again, deliver results for shareholders.
Ingredients of a Turnaround
Domino’s Pizza executed what will go down as one of the great turnarounds of our time. The company took to the extreme the first thing you need to do to chart a truly new course: A private and public acknowledgement that something is seriously wrong.
Domino’s realized it required more than a tweak here and a tweak there. If you recall, Domino’s basically told the world, "We suck!" It positioned an entire ad campaign around that reality. Domino’s promised to get better — and it did.
It’s not just that the quality of Domino’s pizza has improved (it really has), but the company transformed itself into a social company. Domino’s makes ordering online or via smartphone a smooth, pleasant and interactive process. Domino’s took a massive risk, but pulled off its plan. In fact, it has probably worked out better than anybody at the company could have ever imagined. Shareholders reaped rewards as well; Domino’s is up about 135 percent over the last two years.
For one reason or another, RIM refuses to follow Domino’s lead and tell the world the truth —that it sucks. In fact, it’s doing just the opposite. Late last year on Seeking Alpha, I wrote about a well-produced television commercial RIM ran, particularly during Canadian hockey telecasts. In it, a group of young hipsters use Blackberry smartphones to set up a late-night bike ride through the rain-slicked streets of a dark and misty downtown. There was just one little issue with the otherwise excellent effort:
Everybody knows that the loft-dwelling, urban hipsters you see heading out on a nighttime group ride would be texting on iPhones, not BlackBerrys. In fact, it’s almost surreal to see that set messaging on something made by RIM and not Apple.
RIM made the feeble attempt to brand Blackberrys as cool. That’s akin to Domino’s ignoring the fact that it sent out disgusting-looking and awful-tasting pizzas three years ago.
For all intents and purposes, RIM has told investors, in no uncertain terms, that it has absolutely no plans to make any real change. The company intends to move forward with a pipeline that does not look a whole lot different from previous, failed efforts. In fact, you can hardly call the product RIM is about to stake its survival on — Blackberry 10 — all that meaningfully distinct from anything that has come before it.
While Nokia did not go to the extreme Domino’s did, the company admitted failure — even if it did not say as much when it dropped the Symbian platform. It also welcomed the type of move RIM was rumored to make for months.
Microsoft might just save Nokia’s hide. If the new Nokia Lumia Windows Phone is any indication, I think there’s a hot cup of soup’s chance in Finland that it might happen.
Lumia is a solid phone. I own one. I only dislike two things about: The absence of Pandora and the poor performance of Microsoft’s voice recognition system, TellMe, when put up against Apple’s Siri.
Microsoft dropped the ball with TellMe. First, I did not even know my Lumia came equipped with it. I inadvertently held down the Windows icon at the bottom of the phone and discovered it. Second, TellMe has been around for some time, but Microsoft has done very little with it. If it had, it could be as good as, if not better than, Siri.
Instead, it’s pretty bad. Ask TellMe a question and it, more often than not, does one of two things, tells you it cannot answer or directs you to a general Bing search of your command. It’s simply unacceptable that I cannot get local results for even the most basic queries for neighborhood restaurants and such. The voice-recognition technology is up to par, but the utility of the feature is an embarrassment compared to Siri on iPhone 4S.
—By Rocco Pendola, Contributor, TheStreet.com
Additional News: Is There Treasure Hidden in Nokia’s Pile of ‘Junk’?
Additional Views: BlackBerry 10 Is Not Enough to Save RIM: Analyst
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Disclosures:
TheStreet’s editorial policy prohibits staff editors, reporters, and analysts from holding positions in any individual stocks. Disclosure information was unavailable for Rocco Pendola.