The war is on between Apple and Research In Motion, the maker of the Blackberry, not only in the consumer market, but also in the business market, “where Apple’s making advances in fits and starts. Years ago, there were people sneaking a new gadget into the office called a PalmPilot. The same people are sneaking in their iPhones, and eventually Apple’s going to have to figure out a way to make nice with Microsoft Outlook without making the heads spin in the corporate IT department,” Arik Hesseldahl reports for BusinessWeek.
Hesseldahl reports, “Now take a look at the Blackberry 9000, a heavily rumored device that looks an awful lot like an iPhone… The battle is underway, and actually has been for some time. Apple and RIM are in for a real donnybrook in 2008,” Hesseldahl reports.
MacDailyNews Take: The Boy Genius Report has some rumored specs and a product photo of the Blackberry 9000 here, which so far looks like YAiR (Yet Another iPhone Ripoff).
Hesseldahl continues, “Apple’s advantage is media. It has iTunes and music and video behind it, which RIM doesn’t do all that well, at least not yet. RIM’s advantage is its established relationships with corporate IT departments, and with many many carriers.”
Hesseldahl writes, “I for once can’t wait to see Apple’s iPhone sales numbers for its Q1 2008, because that will set the tone for the rest of the year, and if they’re high enough, could put RIM on the defensive.”
Full article here.
Carl Howe writes for Blackfriars’ Marketing, “If Apple actually will sell 5 million units by MacWorld AND it keeps up its aggressive deployments AND it makes no serious missteps with new products (like its 3G iPhone), the iPhone could pass the Blackberry to become the best-selling smartphone on the planet in 2008, and possibly the most rapidly adopted phone in the world. Not bad for an entry product in a market that most pundits claimed was impossible for a new manufacturer to enter.”
Full article here.
While Apple and RIM could very well be ready to fight it out, just imagine if they partnered! By combining their strengths, they could run through the mobile device market like two bulls in a china shop. Either way, Nokia, Palm, Microsoft Windows Mobile-based device makers, Motorola, and others look to be in for a world of hurt in 2008.
RIM is a fraud that just loads tons of extra layers onto mail system that really aren’t necessary – push is smoke and mirrors! RIM is innovative? right…
as to network synch of calendar…who needs it when you can read your calendar directly on your phone via a real web browser?
Exchange is so 1990s
caddisfly,
Not having used it, I can neither verify nor dispute your claims.
And I must agree that success and innovation do not necessarily go hand in hand. After all, look at MicroSoft. But I still don’t understand why we should be against them.
People, people, please…
The iPhone is not the smartest phone on the planet. I doesn’t integrate well with corporate Exchange servers and it doesn’t run corporate based applications. At least not yet. The perceived initial intent of the iPhone was to create a phone that offered more than any other consumer-grade phone could offer and could also please/ satisfy businessmen. Thus, filling in a large gap in the market. Apple figured out how to successfully straddle the line between consumers and professionals. When you think about it, Apple helped invent the prosumer, but I digress. As long as the iPhone exists and remains ‘the iPhone,’ there will be people who will not need its features, and people who wish there were more. What is incredibly interesting to note is the ensuing hordes of people implicitly begging for it. Whether by unlocking the phone or jailbreaking the phone in order to suit their needs or even smuggling them to foreign countries, the statement is clear: PEOPLE WANT THIS DEVICE. Perhaps Apple used a little too much buzz marketing, maybe not, but let’s face it. IT WORKED. When you stop everything in your head and think about it for just a moment…
A phone that works with 8 GB of my iTunes (I don’t have to buy duplicates of all my songs and I might actually use my phone to listen to music)
A phone that delivers the best mobile browser (Looks just like my computer at home, I actually use it).
A phone with a map program that’s more ingenious than GPS (I can figure out where OTHER PEOPLE ARE, what an f-ing amazing concept). Realistically, how lost do I get? How often am I totally lost, but have cell signal? GPS is such a waste.
A phone that delivers a revolutionary multi-touch interface that’s truly state of the art for a mobile solution (whodathunkit?).
A phone that works as a GREAT PHONE, syncing any and all data to and from my Mac OR PC.
Hands down, the iPhone actually delivers on all promises that were made, a respectable gesture on Apple’s part. We can all see that the iPhone has room to grow. I hope that one day, there will maybe be three iPhones. For instance, the iPhone Nano- for general consumers looking for a multi-touch, iPod and phone. the iPhone- as she stands today, and the 3G iPhone- a phone that integrates well into corporate culture and delivers on being the most powerful phone money can buy. Just thoughts…
First, there is no “lack of enterprise integration,” only endless stubbornness and tunnel vision from Windows-only IT departments. To integrate the iPhone into corporate environments, IT departments need to open the IMAP protocol within the closed network (no security issue) and set up a VPN on the iPhone using VPN standards. Done. This is a secure solution. They are simply ignorant to it or refuse to adopt it for nonsensical reasons.
Second, has anyone ever realized that maybe Apple’s supposed “lack of enterprise integration” is actually a good thing? If Apple ever officially supported Exchange and MAPI, it would just cement Microsoft’s dominance in enterprise email. People are clamoring for this phone. It’s only a matter of time before IT departments won’t have a choice except to support it. When that time comes, they will have to embrace open standards, which will inherently weaken Microsoft’s position. This is a very good thing. I, for one, hope that there is never a good solution for Exchange and MAPI on the iPhone.
and I say… KILL RIM!
Lazy, Yair… when a company takes that route instead of innovating… they should lose.
Research In Motion… stupid name. Implies nothing.
Specially for a telecommunications device co.
Apple will do what they offered Creative Labs.
Then it’s over. Hurray for Apple!
Dougless
They can approach Apple and request and request and request…
Apple said it will offer open iPhone for developers.
Just w8, be frickin’ patient. IPhone is still NEW.
AND it’s UE blows EVERY YaIR with ease.
The device is a BEAUTIFUL GOSH DARN pleasure to use.
Apple’s UI and UE will not be duplicated.
It took Apple LESS then ONE year to get this penetration into the global cellular market… THEY did a supberly – an amazing job.
The next two years, it will all be YAIR – trying to catch up… AND this is good for everyone… Apple changes the landscape. Jobs yet again put a dent into the universe.
Let see if Bill’s table does the same? Snoozin’.
IT departments didn’t want Macs, they got them, they didn’t want OSX… but it happened… iPHONE is there already.
Waiting to be fully accepted. That’s soon gentles; very soon.
Because, RIM with it’s new/yet to be sold BlueBerry9000 will have to be AMAZING, far cheaper, and do all it claims FOR people to REPLACE the fleet of crap RIM put out there.
HOW many times is IT going to buy…
the work on a FRANKENSTEIN LIKE APPROACH… BITS AND PIECES OF crap here and there, putting together monsters out of control. Always requiring MAINTENANCE.
Ahhh, shoot I just understood why now… gosh…
Dougless
That’s the crack APPLE filled.
Apple found a market inbetween CORPORATE and REGULAR CONSUMERS.
How often is CORPORATE going to replace it’s phones because of Apple. Corporate will only replace the few memeber at the top of the Board with this BlueBerry9000… meanwhile Steve has the regular folk walkin’ in with their personal iPhones looking SPECTAULAR and WORKING spectacular as well.
RIM will DIE or do I dare say — maybe they will try to DUMP MS… NO — that won’t happen COS RIM is locked in with MacroSloth for the long run.
Apple already has WON!
The NEXT iPhone with the
NEW Intel Mobil chip will solidify Apples position.
goodbye RIM
Dougless
Dougless,
Just WHAT did you drink for breakfast? Hic!
Jay-Z certainly nailed the IT at the uni where I work: “IT departments are the new car mechanics: they try to tell you whatever is convenient for them, hoping you won’t know enough about what they’re talking about to challenge them. Except they take it a level beyond that by also telling you which car you’re allowed to drive and where you’re allowed to drive it. They’re insufferable.” And add incompetent, to boot. We had system crashes that lasted for days, email meltdowns, etc., routinely. Sigh.
Hm…
I work for a small company with about 120 employees. It has a really lackadaisical attitude about IT matters that scares the crap out of me. People that have admin privileges who really shouldn’t, PCs that aren’t secure, idiots with internet access who surf the web and spend hours on MySpace. It’s a major accident just waiting to happen. I have advised and bitched and gotten a little action but not enough. They just don’t take it seriously.
They now use Dells with XP exclusively, so I don’t think my fears are unfounded. If our system goes down it affects MY job and that ticks me off. All it will take is one of these saps with something really damaging and recent on their USB flash drive to destroy us, since many PCs don’t have an anti-virus and those that do aren’t kept up to date.
So depending on how you look at it, having an IT department that acts like the Gestapo isn’t necessarily all bad. Of course, if they are goose stepping control freaks AND incompetent, then you’re screwed anyway. “Sigh” is right.
OK, first of all… all you IT nay-sayers who think you know it all…
Something you need to remember is that corporate IT is there to provide business tools that have business purpose, at an acceptable price to the business. Note the accent on business!! The tools are there to assist the business, and its usually dictated BY the business as to what IT is supposed to do, and how (to a certain extent). IT are expected to provide security, reliability, functionality, and fit-for-purpose tools, on a completely re-produceable basis. And to do this at SLA’s that often aren’t achievable on the static or decreasing budgets that they are given.
Go support multi-thousand seat environments based on your little view of the world… where you spend 40 wasted hours tweaking your command-line terminal to get it ‘just right’, because it makes u 0.01% more productive than the default ‘out-of-the-box’ one.
Part of the issue (and this is a personal belief, based on my work in a MS-orientated outsource IT company) is the toolsets that people in the industry myopically gravitate towards. Supporting the MS environments is a serious PITA in terms of security and patching etc. But thats not going to go away, no matter what platform you run. Even if its not needed, it would still be expected to be provided with other platforms. Once bitten, twice shy.
And to be honest, while you lot are all sitting there w**king about Web2 this and social that, MS do actually provide toolsets which allow the corporate world to do a lot of deep integration between product sets and provide a lot of additional business orientated functionality with relative ease. The basic issue there is that its locked-in functionality, since MS just cant seem to keep themselves away from the ’embrace and extend’ mindset.
The OS world, for example, is only just finally starting to make group calendaring solutions (that actually work) available. This is something that Notes and (the much maligned) MS Exchange have been doing for well over 10 years. To be honest, in my belief, its been the mail/calendaring architecture thats driven MS in the corporate environment as much as MS Office has.
Ive been trialing and reviewing IMAP solutions for years in the hope that they would provide the level of functionality to allow me to push the idea of ditching Exchange. I personally believe that corporate shops are painting themselves into a corner with MS products, which is going to create themselves serious legacy headaches WELL into the future. However, the problem is that the alternatives to the MS products often fall down in a number of areas. Corporate users would expect something (for example) at LEAST as easy, functional, integrate-able, and responsive, as Exchange / Outlook before looking elsewhere, and thats without looking at the $$$ involved.
The basic point Im trying to make here is that the sandpits are different. What works (and makes sense) in a consumer or individual, or small environment, often just doesnt scale in terms of supportability or cost or architecture. And at the end of the day, if you havent played in the sandpit, then you dont know what the sand is like.
/rant off
On a side note, I beat MS products round the head all day at work… and this is written on my 4y/o Power Mac at home, which I brought when it appeared that it would turn out to be the first user-friendly *NIX OS that would suit for both my AND my significant other. This was a great purchase and I really enjoy being able to come home and USE my computer, not having to spend a good portion of my free time SUPPORTING it.
However, I still believe Apple h/w is overpriced, and suffers from a lack of choice and configurability. I use Macs at home because of OS X, pure and simple. NOT because its on Apple hardware (which is very nicely made, but not exceptional).
I bought an iPhone for my wife, but I’m keeping my
BlackBerry. For a corporate email user, the iPhone simply stinks. Putting aside its inability to get push mail over a secure-enough server, the thing can’t even cut and paste!!! No kidding!! I tried to figure out the geniously intuitive way Apple put it in there and had to go to a web site to learn that no cut and paste existed for this phone. You also can’t search in mail or in contacts. That’s just software laziness because both those things should be no-brainers for Apple which has the best search protocols of any computer. So far, the iPhone is just for the instant message crowd.