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BlackBerry To Allow Rivals To Manage Its Smartphones
jfruh (300774) writes "BlackBerry broke its longstanding business model recently by announcing that its BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 management platform would be able to manage not just BlackBerry devices, but Android and iOS gadgets as well. Now, in a new announcement, the company is also exploring the flipside of that coin, allowing software from other companies to manage BlackBerry phones. The moves acknowledge a world in which fewer and fewer people are interested in a vertical BlackBerry solution — but also seem to kill the last things that make BlackBerry special."
A few are beautiful yes. But most black females I have ever seen look like some horrific genetic experiment involving whales, porcupines and gorillas. Its not surprising black men like to say "where da white women at?!" with their typical grammatical mastery of the only language they can speak. Well .. when they're not too busy being 7% of the population but accounting for 55% of all the murders in the nation. But don't worry, some white liberal will make excuses for them. Because that's what always changes things, a steady supply of firmly insisted excuses.
Thank God for the sickle cell.
the BES or Blackberry Enterprise Server has been a piece of shit for as long as I can remember. I still have battle scars from managing it as it mangled inboxes and refused to connect to basics like exchange. They changed cryptography keys on it without notifying anyone and sometimes stopped supporting a legacy device entirely without any advanced notice. Third party companies that write their own management system might gain some traction for corporate offices that are sick to death of having to put up with blackberries 'fuck off and die' support. and hey, if your office is big enough, maybe blackberry will fork over some source and let your devops team write something that doesnt faceplant on the daily.
Good people go to bed earlier.
RIM/BlackBerry has been in decline for years.
The stuff they played a role in pioneering are now pretty much commodities. They rested on their laurels for way too long, and eventually got lapped by the rest of the market. Apple and Android have huge market shares compared to what BlackBerry still has.
They've been laying off people, closing buildings, and putting out products hardly anybody buys, and they've been saddled with ineffective management for years.
They're well on their way to becoming a footnote. Their founders all got rich and moved on.
What we're watching is the dying days of a once cool company.
Sad to see them go, but this is largely a mess of their own creation, even if they don't realize it.
I know people who owned their PlayBook tablet -- and, quite frankly, they were crap. There was nothing in the store, their Android support was a joke, and then they stopped giving updates for it. I'm betting most of the people who ever owned that tablet wouldn't ever own another product from them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Why would allowing others to use the APIs, rather than keeping them super-secret as a rent extraction strategy, 'kill' their specialness?
Presumably the same management options as before will still exist, you'll just be able to use other software to actually set those options, should it please you. If the actual security of the management process depended on the APIs being secret than it was horribly broken long ago (reverse-engineering a proprietary system well enough to build a competing application is either superior or you can profitably sell for less is hard, especially if the vendor is willing to mess with you; reverse engineering just enough of it that basing its security on the assumption of its secrecy is substantially easier). If BES remains superior, you can still use it. If you don't elect to, your blackberries are now not nearly unmanageable bricks(and, hopefully, won't suffer the shit that is BIS...)
Blackberry has only 3% market share as of Jan 2014. If you use a company like Citrix, Airwatch, Mobile Iron, Good Tech then you'll notice that the APIs are there for Apple and Android. Not so much for other vendors. It's almost like they completely missed the boat.
That might produce some additional revenue. They're suing the makers of a look a like solution for the iphone. Why not just take a cut of everyone that wants to do it, and help them do it as well? It might revitalize physical keyboard handsets.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
but also seem to kill the last things that make BlackBerry special.
You think the competing management platforms driven to be as generic as possible and manage multiple vendors' phones will be "better" at managing BB devices, than their own product?
I see a few ways this may not hurt BB... (1) It makes their smartphones more attractive, if they will be compatible with customers' existing management solution.
(2) Potential licensing fees from developers of management software for access to SDKs and advanced APIs.
and (3) They may still provide superior manageability/functionality for their own management platform, by using undocumented APIs, or by introducing new APIs to their devices and management platform simultaneously --- so they always leverage new management and security features first..
Was at a large IT expo last week, and BlackBerry had a huge presence in the centre stage, impressive stand. Nobody was even interested in their products, the company is smelling like death at every turn.
Rivals to Blackberry?
Enron? RCA? Pets.com?
nt
BB is done. Some of their new products are interesting but BB has been irrelevant for too long. At one time they made the best smartphone on the market, certainly the most secure. Then they got fat and lazy and Apple and Android sped past them.
I had one of the older BB phones with the small screen and physical keyboard. Loved it. Great battery life, good call quality, secure. But no apps to speak of. Poor quality handsets (I know a lot of people that had to return them due to hardware failures). Then I got an iPhone and never looked back. Well, never looked back at BB. I did look at (and own) Android phones.
Now it's a two horse race. To me, BB is kind of like Windows phones. Yeah, some nice features but I'm not about to buy one. So long BB...we hardly knew ya.
Someone please put Blackberry out of its misery. Its reputation is a joke and excuse both before it ultimately dissolves away.
"...but also seem to kill the last things that make BlackBerry special."
Shouldn't that be made Blackberry special? I mean, I loved my old crackberry as much as the next geek back-in-the-day... but pretty nearly everyone has moved on, at this point.