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Microsoft to Replace Blackberry?
nmccart writes "According to Wired Magazine, Microsoft, along with Cingluar and Vodaphone, is planning to introduce the next generation of Windows Mobile phones that can receive e-mails "pushed" directly from servers that handle a company's messaging. This will allow companies to skip over the cost of installing a Blackberry server, and instead just use the Exchange servers that they are already using. The question becomes, now that this technology is cheaper, will my VP be buying new Windows Mobile enabled cell phones for his entire department just so we can put in more hours?"
My Treo already has email, a Web browser, and SMS capability. This would just involve Microsoft, and as good as they are at designing easy UIs, I don't see how that would be necessary.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
I've been using "Push" email with ChatterMail on my Treo 600 and my company's IMAP server for a while now.
No Mickysoft exchange server needed.
(a) First iteration of MS products are seldom stable, RIM is already there.
(b) The existing Crackberry addicts will only switch when their existing units are pried from their cold dead fingers.
(c) I'll contend that the majority of type-A folks that need this already have it in Blackberry, and MS and the cell providers will be trying to get people to switch vs. trying to get lots of new customers to buy in. Smaller potential market, and perhaps already near saturation.
Yes, but Microsoft's business strategy can't last forever. We all know that only two software products financially support the rest of the company. Their stock has been stagnant for a long time. Eventually they'll be spread so thin that they'll have to go through a major overhaul. Their only hope for growth in the short term is large sales of Windows and Office in developing nations.
Developers: We can use your help.
Microsoft can never provide the one BlackBerry 'killer app', and that's PIN messaging. PINs are encrypted end-to-end and never are visible to anyone other than the sender and receiver. As the underlying protocol that carries the other messages (email for example) on the BlackBerry system, they are highly secure and that's why governments trust the system for such messages. But email uses untrusted servers and crosses app boundaries - PINs don't - so only a PIN can be trusted.
For those that don't know, PIN messages are transferred through the BlackBerry network from the sender's 'berry over a dedicated GPRS APN using AES encryption. After that, they are passed up to Waterloo ON where they are routed - without being decrypted - to the destination, where the reverse of the sending occurs. Note that nowhere does the BES or email enter into this.
For savvy but non-technical users (i.e. many executives) who want to keep their conversations private, a PIN simply can't be beat - you've got a commercial service which guarantees delivery (you can check when your PIN arrives with a little 'D' in your sent items) and guarantees security. Plus you don't have to pass around public keys to make it work.
Yes, you can do email any number of different ways. And yes, you could secure messages with AES encryption although nowhere near as easily as this. But to get all of that in a box with ease of use that pleases executives... hard to beat RIM on this one.
I work at a small-sized consulting firm, last year a few of the managers/execs so me with a a Siemens SX-66 Windows Mobile Phone that I bought on my own dime and decided that they wanted one. So, they bought about a dozen and they were universally despised. The software was finicky, they Sprint models they had behaved differently than my Cingular model and they all developed mechnical problems and broke after a while. Mine, well it's still running fine, but I treat it like what it is... a small computer and not a phone. After much belly-aching and nashing of teeth we got crackberries. They just work. They're not the most technically amazing things, the screens aren't great, etc, etc, etc. But they work, they don't break that easily and they're almost idiot proof... perfect for today's office environment.
Hey, if there can be an antitrust suit over itunes and the iPod, then maybe the courts could give us one over Exchange. Force MS to open the specs to Exchange.
It just, ewh.
Oh okay, how bad was it? Well ewh. Yes it is childish but it was just so... ewh. I can't really put it in anyother way. Mediocre perhaps but that ain't it. Bad? No the basic idea was okay but just well done in an ewh way. Not so much buggy as just not working.
Offcourse it had to be rebooted or rather reset every few hours. Of course it froze and of course programs crashed. It was a first generation MS product. But that wasn't the only problem, anyway the unit I worked with was a test unit not a final production unit so it might have improved later (yeah right).
What was the real problem? Well take the browser. It was a crap version of IE (or should that be crappier? Crapiest?) version 5 I think with NO css support at all. None. Bit of a nasty shock to our designer that was.
It was a bitch to delvelop for when you got it to work. Meanwhile the other unit was one of those nokia phones, the one you got if you were a good boy, with an opera browser that was just like a real browser.
It for me was a typical MS product, badly done, half done and not finished. Did it sell? Yeah it did, not well but well enough. That is MS entire business strategy I think. Flood the industry with products that are crap but get accepted by the morons to force everyone to support MS.
It is kinda like IE. Every web builder knows that IE is the worst browser ever build but it is the one that controls what you can and cannot do on a website. Just today I had to tell someone that to have a fixed bar at the bottom of a website is not possible on their site because IE does not properly support css position: fixed. Works perfect in every browser except IE so you cannot use it on mainstream sites.
Will MS sell these phones to people that should have bought blackberry's. Off course. Probably not enough to be successfull but enough to force everyone to once again limit themselves to the lowest common denomenator.
Yuck. Someone please make my day and shoot a MS user.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If blackberry has any brains on its company, now would be a good time to give away their server as a GPL compatible thing.
This way, we (as in you and me) could make many FOSS groupware work with their POSH protocol and give MS a true run for their money.
On the other hand, BB would see their devices sales increase by leveraging on FOSS messanging solutions and i think we would have a chance to finally push MS the fuck out of that space (email and PIMS).
NO SIG
I played with this technology for a Treo 650 6 months ago. Enabling it required me to expose my Exchange server to the internet on some funky ports, I declined. I had to try to use a VPN client that never quite worked right, we gave up and went to Blackberry.
If they don't resolve teh security concerns this isn't real compelling.
And if you set your phone to check for mail every 10 mins and you have a contract that allow free calls to specified 'business-connected' phone lines you have a workable solution without the need for proprietary servers and very little cost. We also use via wifi links from our PDAs - VERY workable.
AT&ROFLMAO