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The Complete History of RIM
museumpeace writes "I enjoyed reading Alex Frankel's thorough Tech. Review article on the luck, persistence and shrewdness that took RIM's proprietary mobile e-mail technology from presumed small niche product to the must-have blackberry that so many use today. Although the technology at the heart of the product was developed in 1989, it took years of further development, the lucky break of GPRS supplanting Mobitex, and the business smarts to jump on their first-mover advantage and the daring to partner with giant Nokia who could have swallowed RIM. Its a great example of how to succeed by carefully making a defacto standard out of a good proprietary technology."
Blackberry is used by so many? just recently on slashdot was the first time I and many had heard of it.
Marketing hype taking over slashdot.
I thought that we were shunning this approach at standards wrangling? Whenever MS or Sony tries this we are against it what is different this time?
The Blackberry is popular because it does what you want it to do without any hassle. Other PDA Email devices suck in comparison. It seems so simple - basically be a live connected email client, but all the others just have ridiculous methods of going about it.
It's the same thing as Tivo. You don't realize how nice the Tivo is until you try the cable company's DVR. Sure, it accomplishes the task, but it's more painful.
eeeewwwwww...
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
The thing to keep in mind is that most of the Blackberries being sold are to companies, and that they are buying them primarily for the email (and possibly cell phone/direct connect) functions, not as PDA's.
The Treo may be a better PDA, but the Blackberry is a great email device. With Enterprise Server it's easy to set up and manage, and it's pretty intuitive to use.
We've started getting some Blackberries at the college where I work, as sort of a pilot program. I recently got a Blackberry 7220 (Nextel) thru work and am pretty happy with it - except for no longer having an excuse to tell my boss that I didn't get her email
I have blog like everyone else
I work for a mid-sized CPA firm, and I have to manage our Blackberries. I have had more problems with them than any other handheld. From parts of the address book being completely lost, both on the handheld and in Groupwise, to duplicated calendar entries, to some accounts simply refusing to synchronize. There tech-support is a shame, every time I call I get the same answer, "Delete the RIM folder under application data." We told our Partners not to get them, but they just had to have them because "everyone else has them so they must work" we showed the examples of people having problems with them, but "that must be isolated." Now since they don't work, it must be GroupWise's fault because so-and-so uses Outlook and it works fine. If you look at the Blackberry Forums there are plenty of Outlook users having issues, and deleting the Outlook profile seems to be the fix-all, thats a pain when you consider 4,000 person address books and 2000 calendar entries. Funny though, one Partner decided to go with the Treo, and I have never had to work on it since he got it a year and a half ago.
It does work with exchange, but you have to add more "stuff" to exchange to make it work.
Ideally, the blackberry should look like every other email user in the world out there.
In other words, the middleware (the toll bridge) that blackberry has built is, in my opinion, superfluous. It forces the infrastructure to treat users differently based on the type of end device.
What I'd rather see is the blackberry use existing protocols (Secure IMAP? POP via secure tunnel?)
I'm not blaming blackberry I like their business plan or saying their technology is bad it isn't. The stuff seems to work.
I think the entire device is superfluous.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you