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RIM Strikes Back, Files Countersuit Against Visto
SilentOne writes "Research In Motion Ltd. launched an all-out assault on competitors yesterday, countersuing its latest legal nemesis and introducing software to pre-empt imminent launches by other challengers. The countersuit also gives RIM a chance to move the patent battle to a courtroom where it has a better chance of beating Visto. Visto filed suit against RIM on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, which reportedly favours patent holders in 92% of cases heard by the court. Jim Balsillie, RIM's co-chief executive, said the company wants the trial moved to the Dallas area, where RIM's U.S. headquarters are located, for practical reasons.
Meanwhile, RIM is giving away a free software package, valued at US$3,000, to hook the e-mail accounts of small businesses and consumers up to BlackBerries instead of competitive devices from Palm and Microsoft."
This just highlights fundemental flaws in our countries IP laws. Here is a successful company with a sought after product, and they can't keep themselves out of court for violating IP concerns.
Nevermind the technical merits of said device, which I have never owned or had to work with.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I'm beginning to think I should have listened to my English teacher and gone into law, instead of I.T
I'm always disgusted when I see the ridiculous "valued at" statements in advertising. I publish some relatively obscure free (GPL'd) software, so I suppose I may as well assert that it's "valued at $10,000,000".
What you're discussing is only a small portion of the problem. These sort of incidents are what will directly lead to nations like China and India taking the lead in technological developments.
While American companies are mired in legalities, and restricted in their ability to produce and innovate (two things which any successful economy requires), Indian and Chinese companies will not be so restrained. As American companies are wasting resources on petty legal fights over patents, Chinese and Indian teams will actually be taking part in the development of the next generation of technology.
Many suggest that the trade ties between China and the US are enough to prevent China from saying to hell with the US. Such people are naive. They don't realize that the 2 billion people of China and India far eclipse the American market. Soon enough, the demand for technology in China and India themselves will be enough to fuel future innovation, regardless of what the American market demands.
It's likely that in the future, historians will discuss how the freedom of innovation in places like China and India, and the lack thereof in the US due to excessive legal barriers, directly led to the decline of the US in favor of India and China.
Having used the latest BBs for over a year with the best set up (I work for RIM btw), let me give you a few reasons why the BB is different and so good.
:\
-full integration with Exchange/Lotus/groupwise. Any important action which I can do from outlook, I can do from my BB and everythign is mirrored and synchronized
--typically any mail sent to my email gets to the device less than 1-2s after it gets to outlook. deleting, marking as read, forwarding, replying etc, everythign you do to a message on the BB is mirrored in outlook an vice versa.
--calender is wirelessly sync'ed and you can accept requests, send out invitations etc.
--memos, tasks, contacts etc, etc are all wirelessly sync'ed as well. Entering any such data on the BB will automatically send it to outlook. Beleive me, this is VERY useful.
--the BB is efficient and uses A LOT less bandwidth than MS PPC handhelds.
--RIM's has infrastructure is very reliable.
--Security is very very important. The US government uses is extensively, and they even have a BB smart card reader.
--it can be administered remotely, have applications pushed to it, different IT policies enforced etc, pretty easily.
Basically, the handhelds themselves are pretty nice (though not exceptional), the whole package is unbeatable. No wonder the only way companies are trying to stop RIM is through the courts.
"...said Deepak Chopra, an analyst with National Bank Financial..."
Must not be the same Deepak Chopra as this meditation nut.
I hope.
The whole series is of course:
I. The NTP Menace
II. Attack of the Lawsuits
III. Revenge of the USPTO
IV. A New Lawsuit
V. RIM Strikes Back
VI. Return of the Blackberries
Now available on DVD in classic and digitally re-mastered editions!
Now what the MSRP for a piece of software (or, again, anything) is is it's value plus a profit margin that's determined by "what the market will bear."
It's true that when a company says their software is valued at $X that they're really telling you their MSRP, not its actual value, aka, its development cost.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
"Valued at $3000". By who? How can they say something like this wiht a straight face?
is barely mentioned in TFA. What they're referring to is BlackBerry Enterprise Server v4.1 Express.
Only a 1-User licence is provided for free, however.
RIM is obviously worried about Microsoft giving away push technology in Exchange Server 2003 SP2.
--memos, tasks, contacts etc, etc are all wirelessly sync'ed as well. Entering any such data on the BB will automatically send it to outlook. Beleive me, this is VERY useful.
Blackberrys are great except for two major things that drive us crazy at my company:
1. RIM refuses to build IMAP functionality into Blackberry Enterprise Server. Most of our company's email users connect to a Linux IMAP server, but we have to provide an Exchange server just to accomodate the Blackberries, even if the users don't need any groupware features.
2. Because some of our users are on Exchange and some are on the IMAP server, we have to maintain a company contact list in public folders on Exchange. But BES doesn't sync public folders or provide LDAP search capability, so the Blackberry users can't sync these contacts wirelessly (some of these users don't have a computer).
When is RIM going to fix these issues?
"Valued at $3000". By who?
:)
RIM of course.
How can they say something like this wiht a straight face?
I see where you are going, but you would be wrong.
Actually this is what they typically charged customers for it previously. Its not some magical artificial suggested retail price that nobody ever actually paid... that they plucked out of their ass; people actually did pay around 3k for a modest Blackberry Enterprise Server package.
I'm so sick of being in meetings with people sit their like overgrown
children playing with their Blackberries when they're supposed to be
paying attention. My opinion is that these "tools" far from aiding business
actually cause far more time to be wasted than anything else yet devised
(including the cellphone!) as insecure middle management constantly check
for emails from the boss they're currently brown nosing. It they couldn't
use them I genuinely believe the business enviroment would be a lot
healthier.
Kind of like how America took the lead over Europe in the 19th century because Europe had relatively restrictive IP laws which America did not respect, so Americans (notably Edison) freely stole European innovations while Europeans were forced to respect American property rights and could not steal back?
Listen up, America. If you don't want to go the way of Europe and sink into mediocrity and irrelevance, you have two choices... either you loosen up your crazy draconian IP laws, or you declare all-out war on China and India. Sadly, the way things are going, I suspect it'll be the latter...
It certainly sounds to a lot of people like a bunch of IP parasites are taking it in turns to sue RIM in the hopes that they can cash in on its work and marketing by virtue of it being a foreign company and not used to the USA's sue-happy culture -- that certainly sounds like the NTP case in a nutshell.
My sig is too lon
Right. Restrictive IP laws are what made Europe irrelevent. Those two world wars really didn't do much to shape European culture. IP law, however, stamped its mark on the face of the continent forever.
RIM is a Canadian company, and the US patents involved do not apply to RIM's business in Canada and presumably other non-US countries. The same situation will happen to other companies, whether they are in China or India, if they wish to do business in the US. So I do agree that the whole patent nonsense is impeding innovation, but if a company wants to tap into the US market, they're going to have to deal with this problem until it gets fixed (which, I suspect, I won't live to see).
Yes, because obviously the only thing to do is to keep cutting big checks to unproductive leeches taking advantage of the amazing incompetence of the USPTO to file lawsuits which have no basis in reality!
Please tell me you're not responsible for drawing up any company's business plan...
My sig is too lon
if a company wants to tap into the US market
For many Indian and especially Chinese companies, US market may soon (5-10 years) be almost irrelevant, especially if there is a big difference in IP laws between the countries. If you're likely to lose more on court battles than you're likely to make on sales, then there's no point in coming to the market in the first place, no matter how big it may be. And Japan will likely be more than happy to concentrate on Asian market as well, if US market becomes too expensive.
And if Asian countries want to get agressive in an economic war, they'll just concentrate on stiffling innovation and economy in the US by abusing the legal system...
Ok great it does sync with Exchange well, lets look at some of the 'features' though.
If your battery runs low the blackberry will disable wireless. Now thats great because I get extra life out of the device and can use all the PIM functions for a while without wireless. Now if you plug it into a charger guess what it doesnt do? It never re-enables the wireless, so if you're not paying attention and dont "enable wireless" you'll be wondering why you're not receiving any phone calls or emails.
The desktop software for windows includes a "Automatic Backup" feature, its not very automatic though because it asks you if you want to back it up, what you want to name the backup, etc. How about a "scheduled backup" and a "automatic backup" the difference being that the scheduled backup asks you these stupid questions and the automatic backup will just backup whatever you select when configuring it and use a naming scheme like 'backupMMDDYYYY'.
Another neat thing is there are *two* internet browsers on the BB. You have "blackberry browser" and "internet browser", I can't really see much difference between them, but its annoying that there are two programs that do what seems to be the same thing.
Also, this may be related to my network/outlook setup, but typically my email gets to my BB long before it hits my Outlook client, which is somewhat fun because I'll feel the thing vibrate and look at outlook but see no email.
And the keyboard on this thing (BB 7250) really does make your hands hurt quick. I used to have a Danger Sidekick and I could type extremely fast with my thumb and never feel like a. I was going to drop it while typing and b. my thumbs were going to fall off.
Overall I'm not really very impressed with the blackberry, but atleast the Exchange stuff works as advertised.
-miah
> $10 trillion economy doesn't become irrelevant.
;-)
Huh? Of course it will! It's just a question of when. Roman economy is currently irrelevant. Spanish economy is irrelevant. UK economy is irrelevant. US economy will be irrelevant. Let's hope it won't happen very soon though.
You see, most of that $10 trillion figure depend on most of world trade being in US$, and US foreign debt being $ as well. If that changes, and if it changes too fast, then there'll be trouble... And there will be change when Chinese and Indian economies grow bigger than US economy... And especially if European economy grows much bigger than US economy (but I doubt that very much, unless something extraordinary happens with Eastern Europe and Russia...)
> It might be wishful thinking on your part
Let me assure you that I'd be just as unhappy as you, if not more so, if it were to happen any time soon, 'cos it would be a Bad Thing for both of us, probably...
> No offense to you, but that's why we tend to make money and people like you don't.
So you're a lawyer...?