Motorola Feels Good's Vibrations
from the push-this dept
Motorola has announced plans to buy push email vendor Good Technology, for an undisclosed price. It's an interesting move that turns up the heat on RIM by promising to help further commoditize push email, particularly in the enterprise. Moves like this by Motorola -- and Nokia's earlier purchase of Intellisync -- will loosen the Blackberry's hold on the enterprise push email market as the handset vendors build support for their own systems into their devices. The push email market looks to be changing significantly. It's moving on past the early fad stage into wider adoption. But as that happens, companies will be hard pressed to find the ROI on high-cost solutions for many employees, leading them towards cheaper systems, even if they don't have all the features or bells and whistles of more expensive ones, like Blackberry. If mobile email can be supported on employees' existing or lower-cost devices, that's a significant bonus, as is the ability to not be locked into a particular proprietary system. RIM doesn't satisfy many of these criteria, and the ability of handset and network equipment vendors to cheaply and easily bundle email services into their products should give them a distinct advantage moving forward.
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companies will be hard pressed to find the ROI on high-cost solutions for many employees, leading them towards cheaper systems, even if they don't have all the features or bells and whistles of more expensive ones, like Blackberry
Actually blackberries aren't that expensive compared to other "smartphones." And they're actually quite spartan in terms of features. So I don't think this argument is valid. Blackberries are just really highly optimized for corporate email, and users like them, gosh darnit. They're also marketed to lawyers, salespeople, executives, politicians, etc. -- groups that don't care so much about low cost. In fact, for some of them high cost items are prefered because of their status.
People have been predicting the demise of the blackberry for years, but it just isn't happening. I think the pundits just don't understand the market. Motorola, Nokia, Microsoft, Palm think they can compete with RIM by adding more features and/or undercutting the price. But it's not working. Truth be told RIM doesn't really have any competition. The so-called "competitors" still haven't grasped what makes a blackberry attractive to these people. By the time they do it may be too late.
Another thing that keeps people from switching away from blackberry is the perceived security of the system. Whether the system is actually secure or not is beside the point -- people think it is secure, and RIM goes out of its way to present its products as secure. Until the others can convince the CTOs and PHBs that their solution is as secure, we're not going to see alot of switchers.
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No more expensive
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Re:
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You do have to wonder...
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