Have you heard the sound of spinning? If not, all you have to do is read this piece in The Wall Street Journal (sub required) about RIM releasing some new software that will work on non-Blackberry devices (initially only for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile devices), and will be a fully featured release.
At present, RIM offers a Blackberry Connect software for Nokia and Palm devices, that has limited functionality. RIM says that software is going to be available “later this year,” so why talk about it now… unless it is to divert attention away from all the negative press the company is getting as a result of last week’s massive outage. Paint me cynical, but this is just SPIN.
Update: The RIM Press release offers more details, and only this bit is mildly interesting:
Support for BlackBerry® Mobile Data System (BlackBerry MDS) allowing organizations to develop their own BlackBerry applications or deploy third-party BlackBerry applications that can run on Windows Mobile-based devices as well as BlackBerry smartphones.
Agree. I was thinking the same thing when I read the news article this morning. Big deal. My Exchange service delivers my mail to my Moto Q via ActiveSync as fast as I want it – which is typically faster than it makes it to my PC!
is anyone going to actually start to talk about what exactly rims business model is…er um well we make a middleware server that sits in between our proprietary handhelds and your exchange server. oh and by the way, your exchange server actually has the same functionality and is um er well FREE. now in notes or other shops they have a pourpose but its time for them to face the music
All companies thrive on spin. When companies announce things like this, I wish they’d advertise a beta testing program. Jerks.
Sure, RIM has outages, but I use Microsoft Exchange Server and I bet my companies exchange server has more outages than RIM’s.
Uh… Spin? Maybe the timing is suspect here, but why the need to kick them when they are down. I mean, what’s the point really other than making a somewhat useless speculatitive comment. How does this post increase any value whatsoever?
RIM is still the category leader and with a unified OS/Hardware strategy they will continue to be the market leader for corporate devices for sometime. No IT department wants to support hardware and OSs from multiple vendors and deal with the support issues that come with it. IT departments want secure / reliable / and consistent devices that work. Exchange is hard enough to manage as a standalone product and BES makes administration about as easy as possible.
Besides, most IT departments will trade a half day of downtime for the ease of use/maintenance of RIMs platform. Besides the cost for an organization to migrate off RIM and to something else is gigantic.
RIM will survive this latest debacle with their network / middleware and continue to flourish. I’m surprised RIM hasn’t decided to MVNO; but perhaps its counter to their partnerships with carriers. The virtualization software (if it actually exists?) is actually pretty cool development that could further strengthen their market dominance. I’m sure there are a lot of Slingbox owners on the Q that also have a corporate blackberry since the BB doesn’t run Sling. Being able to run all of MS apps and BB software in a virtual envirnment is pretty compelling.
Drew
PS: I have no position or interest in RIM other than just general interest.
Drew, gotta argue with you on the cost of going away from RIM. All it took was an IT guy checking a box out of the Exchange server and it was up and running.
Were I to try to go with a Blackberry, we would have had to buy additional seats. We run Outlook anyway, so everything was very easy. Took about 10 seconds.
Every company announces products ahead of schedule. What’s the difference between iPhone, Vista vs. this situation?
Because WES is coming up?
totally agreed. For all the warts that WinMo has, its beauty is that it syncs really well w/ Exchange and Office apps, has AUTD (push), thus obviating the need for the blackberry enterprise server.
I’ve talked to BBerry about this, and they agreed that this software is not really useful unless you’re an enterprise that wants to maintain one platform (BES) and give end users a bit more leeway as to choice of what handheld to carry. (ie: they can choose either a blackberry or a winmo device, and IT just maintains the BES).