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BlackBerry futures

14 March 2006 by Rod McLaren

The RIM settlement with NTP is finally done, ending months of speculation as to whether the BlackBerry service would be switched off. A deal was going to be inevitable once it became clear that the court wasn’t going to wait for the chance that the patent office would review and over-turn all of NTP’s patents. Mobile Enterprise Weblog asks whether RIM was a bit over-zealous in its confidence in the technical fix. This, and the months of uncertainty will have made some existing customers will a bit irritated, and certainly the deal could have been done some time ago. (Slate has a good – if a little RIM-biased – overview of the patent back-story: How a tiny little ‘patent troll’ got BlackBerry in a headlock).

The future for mobile email

So the deal is done now, and it’s back to business as usual for BlackBerry. Except that in the last half-year, the other mobile email vendors—Good Technology, Visto, Seven, Microsoft, Nokia (who recently bought Intellisync), and the open-source Funambol—have got lots of coverage whilst RIM was getting bashed around in court. So RIM has work to do.

And those legal challenges aren’t over in this sector: Visto, who did their deal with NTP in late 2005, have sued both Good and Microsoft .

RIM’s 5+ email monoculture will be diluted in the next few years, though expect them to remain a strong player. The other vendors are making better progress on supporting many devices. RIM lags in this area, despite their efforts to license to other hardware vendors with Connect. A device-agnostic approach means faster growing markets for the others, and cheaper devices and services for end-users—and probably lower fees for all vendors as mobile email gets commoditised. There’s a question though whether this device-agnostic approach is unambiguously better: RIM’s historic strength has been in the tight coupling of the user interface to the physical device it resides in, and also the speed of service its proprietary data compression and transport systems delivered. These add up to some lovely device behaviour – resulting in the “crackberry” effect.

And whilst Good Technology’s CEO admits that RIM offers “a completely integrated stack of stuff. If all you want to do is run e-mail on an appliance, then BlackBerry is your choice”, he is betting that developers will be more inclined to write software for Win Mobile, Palm and Symbian. RIM would argue this, but in truth their stack probably is a little harder to develop for. What RIM won’t argue though, is that future growth will come from outside the C-level offices (where the Blackberry’s simple, business-email-only approach historically scored them points), which suggests that devices need to do more for end-users, and get easier for third-parties to develop mobile apps and data services for. To achieve that, RIM needs to speed up its hardware innovation, and open up their software stack a little.

BlackBerry and future mobile data services

Applications that don’t care what devices they’re on—within reasonable limits set by differing screen widths or form-factors—seem to be one strong and obvious growth area. This may mean a trend towards device apps that are thin in everything except the richness of their user interface (eg Flashlite2 emerging alonsider Java midlets), that run on more devices and rely on an always-on connection. Ironically, the BlackBerry is still a great device choice for corporates because it’s so easy to use that there’s often a much reduced training overhead, and its built-in security is pretty good.

Yet, application clients written for a single device platform may be able to take advantage of specific features that a device/device platform offers (eg push/on/offline modes with BlackBerry, or the camera in a smartphone, or handwriting support in some PDAs, and so on), but potentially at higher development cost.

In such a world, there’s a balance to find for application vendors between these approaches to the end-user experience. The customer’s particular business challenge will determine the best fit. Either way though, the customer’s existing business applications and back-ends (eg logistics, or sales/inventory mgmt) mustn’t care what device they talk to, nor how the data is communicated to the device.
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Other BlackBerry-related news this week:


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