Blackberry Recap

Back in 2010 I posted an article titled Droid Doesn’t in reference to the comparisons between Droid phones and the longstanding enterprise market leader, Blackberry. But if you have been following tech news lately, you will see that the RIM platform is slipping terribly compared to Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Andriod Platform.

I have been a long advocate for Blackberry because of the product was built from the ground up to be both a solid mobile phone, and an enterprise class messaging device. In many ways it is still a far superior product with regards to solid phone performance, and enterprise class messaging device, which includes excellent and consistent manageability, and secure messaging abilities.

However in the consumer driven markets, and the ever slow slippery slope of Bring Your Own Device to work policies, we have seen an in rush of competing products.

Products from Apple and Google are not built from a phone company with light computing power; but rather full on computer companies making mini-computers with phone functionally. Due to their experience as a computer company, they have brought to market excellent devices which server a significantly larger dual-purpose of phone and mobile computer. And the platform which Blackberry was built wasn’t computer friendly enough.

In the early years of 2009-2010 when iPhone and Andriod was introduced into the marketplace, it was easy for large enterprises to turn their noses up at those products for the lack of enterprise features and manageability. However in the years since, Microsoft Exchange with Active Sync, along with better active sync support from Google and Andriod, have brought these devices much closer to the standards we expect from an enterprise mobile device, offering security, and policy based control – perhaps best of all, remote wiping.

So today, with many of the reasons to reject the iPhone and Android products gone, these competing phone products are now on a more level playing field. However, that only applies to the enterprise and IT end of the equation. From the end-user prospective, the Blackberry is still a clunky, aged style device. Where the new devices, are more appealing, with thousands of more applications and are more social.

Unfortunately it appears that unless Research In Motion, the makers of Blackberry comes around quickly to adapt, they will disappear very soon. Their last attempts to change from their proprietary OS to the Andriod derived OS doesn’t appear to be working well enough to make them a market leader.