Premature much? Apple was dead once too.
In reality, Apple was acquired by NeXT in a reverse-takeover, and NeXT decided to maintain the Apple and Mac-related brands. It’s more nuänced than that, but effectively that’s what happened.
There are some parallels with RIM's QNX acquisition, but RIM seems to be afraid to throw away the old. You can't milk the cow and have it on the barbecue too.
They aren't going to say that they're abandoning the current platform, they'd Osborne themselves if they did. That doesn't mean that the company isn't throwing all of it's efforts into next year's phone.
Apple sold a lot of bondi blue iMacs before OS X was ready, they wouldn't have survived to ship OSX if they hadn't.
Hardware that provides an upgrade path to new systems is one thing, but RIM released a major revision to BBOS more than a year after the QNX acquisition. I believe the previous CEOs even stated they have no plans to abandon BBOS. Which means that many bright minds are going to be working on it, instead of putting focus on the QNX system.
Imagine if Apple had continued to work on OS9 into OS10 for the iMac line and had another team working on OSX for PowerMacs. That is essentially what RIM has been doing.
Obviously Apple was working on Pink/Copland all through the 90's, then Rhapsody/OS X since early 97. They didn't ship OS X for _3 whole years_, all the while losing market and mindshare to Wintel.
RIM stating that they aren't abandoning the current form of BB OS is to me equivalent to Apple shipping bug fixes for OS 8 (i.e. OS 9) and Carbon support in OS X (blue box), except in RIM's case they are declaring software/service support for BB OS because they understand that smartphone buyers are on a 3 year cycle imposed by the carriers.
I'm not trying to defend RIM's failure to execute, but it's a difficult, multi-year process to ship a new platform without nuking the company. In my mind their biggest failure is that they should have bought QNX in 2007, not 2010.
Nice image. You might have a future in writing horror novels.