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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?"
We don't know if this will be a product that every exec is going to want installed for their workforce, but we can safely assume that yes, you are going to work more hours.
Yes I will. Now get back to work!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Can't wait to see the fireworks when RIM turns around and sues Microsoft for patent infringement of some sort to prevent them from impementing this plan...
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will my VP be buying new Windows Mobile enabled cell phones for his entire department just so we can put in more hours?
Only if you let him. I am on salary and work 40 hours. The first year +, I worked 60 hours plus. Then, as I automated and gaine control over recurring issues, I got more done in 40 than when I was working 60.
I was under pressure to keep working more than 40... I just said 'no'. Simple as that. And I have received a promotion since then, so no "black list" occurred.
If you aren't in a position to say 'no', get there. No job is worth working more than half of your waking hours.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
They will be called "Blueberries." Not because they won't want to be associated with Blackberry, but because of the constant flow of error screens.
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
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.
So many places i know now are running blackberry and so many people i know have blackberry devices i think it will take a long time if it ever does occur for people to switch over to Windows SmartPhones.
I don't know that I entirely agree. While Crackberries are quite popular, I think that there is still a significant number of companies that don't have a mobile email solution that would jump at the opportunity to do it as a "single" solution. As well, as companies look to upgrade, having the all-in-one solution could be quite enticing. The biggest bonus for M$ is that I don't think they are necessarily counting on driving significant additional short term exchange licenses due to this manuver, so they can afford to wait and slowly take on marketshare. Remember, people wouldn't be buying "Windows Smartphones", they're buying mobile email solutions that also allow them to do voice. If a Windows Smartphone fits the bill, then so be it.
(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.
If I could get a discount on my next server just by sending an email that says lets use linux, I would be slightly more ok with them reading parts of my emails.
Blackberry works great for people with no servers etc. Our mobile solution has been Goodlink which makes the Treo a force to be reckoned with (if you get a working Treo that is, but that's another issue...), it can also run on some blackberries(I think) and WinCE.
Support for mobiles built in exchange? Bye-bye Goodlink at $300 a seat.
The deal is that blackberry really nailed outlook integration (meaning, synchronization of all the data you access with outlook), but the blackberry does not do many other things well. Basically, the worldwide number of blackberries is in the 7 digit range, and the number of cell phones is in the 9 digit range, and Microsoft thinks they can go after that. Microsoft has made it easier for windows mobile and palm* (they are a licensee) devices to work with Exchange.
This is in corporations interest to be able to play the device makers against each other, instead of being tied to Blackberry. Basically, a big company with Exchange probably has a Blackberry ent. server working with exchange, and views installing Good (to support Palm devices) as a pain, so they are stuck buying blackberries. This will allow people to become more hardware agnostic, but most places will still stick with a few supported models due to support costs.
All similar to pc software market - MS benefits as the hardware gets cheaper because it does so as it gets more pervasive - bigger market means more possible licenses for Exchange seats.
I hooked up a few of these. This is definitely a Ver 1.0 or Ver 2.0 Microsoft effort. After hooking it up I tried to sync my 1000+ contacts, and it gave up the ghost at ~100, with no errors mind you. Also "push" is not seamless like a RIM, it goes out via the carrier's SMTP to SMS gateway so in some cases it gets crushed in carrier's SPAM filters. Never mind that a very common setup of no front-end OWA server is not supported out of the box, but via "knowledge base" article.
This is not ready for prime time.
Anybody want to bet how long RIM's going to last? Two years? Three?
Microsoft is not a juggernaut that rolls over everything that it touches. They have failed *many* times in becoming even a viable competitor in certain marketplaces, let alone a dominant force that squashes everyone. Examples of where they have not wiped out an established competitor include home finances software (vs Quicken), PDA platforms (vs Palm), game consoles (vs Sony), search engines (vs Google), web portals (vs Yahoo), DRM'ed music files (vs Apple), etc, etc, etc.
RIM is no pushover. They've been building Blackberries for almost 10 years now, and have a lot of technology experience (and a lot of patents) in their pocket. They also have a fanatical following in the corporate world, not unlike iPods in the consumer world. Sure, MS might compete, but put RIM out of business in 2-3 years. *NOT* going to happen!
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
Blackberry does not have a vertical leverage like Apple has with iPod where the content and the device is controlled by a same company.
In fact, many, many, corporations use Exchange and the value proposition (not having to buy an extra wireless email service) is going to be something that is going to be very difficult for Blackberry to compete against.
Add the fact that most power-types that own Blackberries tend to upgrade their device almost every year, there is really nothing holding people back from switching their wireless e-mail service.
In our company we use Orange (UK) Smartphones set up to pull mail (POP3) from a Linux server running Postfix, MailScanner, ClamAV, Razor and SpamAssassin.
That's it.
The only contracted costs are the broadband link, phone rental and call charges.
No licences, no hosted servers, no ($$) Exchange server and no ($$) Blackberry Server.
Nuff said.
AT&ROFLMAO
So many places i know now are running blackberry and so many people i know have blackberry devices i think it will take a long time if it ever does occur for people to switch over to Windows SmartPhones.
Depending on the situation, it will take a much shorter time to switch to Windows Smartphones.
Consider the scenerio where you have an Exchange 2003 Server with an Outlook Web Access (webmail) front end server. Lots of companies either currently have this scenrio or have a similar Exchange 2000 scenerio and will upgrade in a couple of years.. If you have this scenrio, turning on Exchange Active Sync, the technology that makes this happen, is an afternoon of work. Period. It's done. There are no extra licenses, no extra software and no extra infrastruture. Getting approval for it will be increadibly easy, because it carries about the same risks asthe OWA server you're already running.
Now consider you have the exact same scenerio, but also a Blackberry server. It's still painless to turn on EAS, so having the two work side by side is easy. You can have Smartphones and Blackberry offered to your employees. But if you already have EAS and don't have a Blackberry server, how are you going to convince your boss to pony up the cash for Blakberry?
In short, since EAS is "free" (as in "you already paid for it, but didn't know it at the time"), you're far more likely to deploy it than the "expensive" Blackberry server. Thus, MS wins again.
TW
Full disclosure: I've implimented an EAS solution at my company and currently have an Audiovox SMT5600 Windows Smartphone. The Syncing is awesome, though I find myself restarting my phone periodically, something I never had to do with my old Nokias. I've never owned a Blackberry, though the few times I've played with one convinced me they're a fine solution.
While access to e-mail, calendar, contacts, notes, and to-dos are all useful functions of a blackberry that's connected to a corporate Exchange server, I can see a couple of issues:
1) Microsoft isn't exactly known for security. To my knowledge there have been very few hacks of the RIM BES product because of its' nature - it establishes outbound-only connections to the RIM servers which then link back to the wireless providers.
2) MDS. The BES allows (via this same set of secured connections) access to the corporate intranet servers (assuming it's configured to do so). I personally have found this to be a very, very useful feature. Lots of stuff in our daily business does not live in the realm of Exchange, but might live in the realm of our intranet servers. RIM made this easy by allowing admins to avoid worrying about VPN tunnels or SSL connections. Set it up, and it just works. I have a feeling that this product offering might not compete in this arena.
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.
This is all based on second-hand information, so some of it might be wrong, but here's my understanding of how it works.
Getting mail to to a WinCE PDA has always been easy. The standard technique was POP or IMAP over whatever Internet connection you can finagle (eg, GPRS). However that was always a pull technique and the thing about crackberry addicts is they want the mail to appear on their PDA as soon as it arrives at the mail server (push). One technique is to send an SMS every time a mail arrives so the PDA knows to check the server, another technique is to poll the server frequently, but both of those techniques can be very expensive.
The new WinCE enabled PDA achieves push by opening an HTTP XML request back to your Outlook Web Access server. It sends the username and then just waits. If any mail arrives then the OWA sends back a "ping" message that tells the PDA to pull the new mail. When the HTTP request times out the PDA simply opens a new connection. Effectively this works the same as push - mail "appears" on the PDA as soon as the Exchange server gets it - but without excessive bandwidth costs or SMS costs. It also means you don't need special crackberry servers or a crackberry subscription.
So my guess is that this will be the downfall of crackberry, and not a moment too soon.
The good:
------------------
1) If the real-life version works as well as the virtual PC demo I participated in, it will do exactly what the marketing materials say it does.
2) It not only synchs email, but todo, contacts, appointments, etc. Everything but public folders, I think.
3) On the server side, all of the software required to do push sync is free with Exchange Server 2003.
The bad:
------------------
1) Phone requires Windows Mobile 5.0, plus a sync driver/module thingy that (groan) HAS TO BE INSTALLED ON THE PHONE BY THE MOBILE VENDOR.
2) Support for this configuration is, well, going to suck because the mobile vendors will push you through their help desk (pretty much guaranteed to NOT understand this), and Microsoft can't support the mobile piece of the puzzle directly, even though it's technically their software.
3) The range of services over which mobile vendors will be able to exert their control has been expanded to include private corporate messaging, appointments and task lists! Yay!!!!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
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.
Consider this:
One of the main reasons that Blackberries are so popular is their use in Government. This is primarily due to the Blackberries being through several certification processes to demonstrate that they are secure and can be used to manage materiel classified up to a specific level.
The other is that they work.
Now, try to see Microsoft doing the same. They can barely get certification for products that are nearing EOL. Any Windows powered device in this kind of an environment is doomed to fail.
One of the guys here has a Windows powered smartphone - he's forever power cycling the damn thing, or just tossing it in his top drawer and walking away.
Personally I hate Blackberries - they are a PITA to manage with the executive where I work.
But I'd have to hate a Windows powered equivalent even more.
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.
Such a biased opinion requires an objective response.
Everyone I know who has tried a BlackBerry has dumped their previous solution. Even a recent interviewee made note of how he successfully migrated a Treo house to BlackBerry 8700 and 7290s. The difficult part was getting the execs to try something new. As soon as they'd had a day with a BB, they were hooked.
Here's the thing...a lot of these devices try too hard to do everything. The guys at RIM have done just the opposite and stuck with it. They've focused on delivering secure wireless email (and application services) to the end-user. That's where their R&D money goes. Not on building a mini M$ office app that let's you squint at cells. If you're going to do any serious office suite work, you won't be doing it from a mobile...especially one with such a crappy KB and battery life as the Treo 700w.
For those who want to play games, get polled, unencrypted email, sure...the Treo does ok. Businesses require something more. SAP and enterprise services are the biggest growing sector of IT. It only makes sense to use an end-to-end secure wireless solution. No other vendor provides that than RIM at them moment. They write their own desktop, server and device code. They manufacture their own devices. When you control a product at that level, you can offer an unparalleled solution.
Ok...not as objective as I wanted to be (read: subjective), but consumers (and prosumers) have a lot to take into account when buying wireless. Different strokes for different folks.