
Thread beginning with comment 548947
My Opinion
by galvanash on Wed 16th Jan 2013 00:26 UTC
Member since:

I work in IT at a fairly large company, so... (from the article)


You have to ask yourself WHY they are buying iPhones and Android devices in droves... No doubt they are (at least we are), but why? It definitely isn't because they are easier to manage, they are _immensely_ more difficult.

BB Enterprise Server was a pita, but it was a well define pita that dotted its I's and crossed ts T's so to speak. End to end encryption? No problem. Control? Lots of granular control. Integration with corporate email? Name your server, they had you covered (even Lotus Notes). It had is warts, but once you got it up and running it was cake. It was purpose built, it did things the way businesses want to do things - all in one place.

Apple and Android? Managing them requires a hodge podge of 3rd party tools and the learning curve is very steep. Even then, it isn't quite the same thing, there are a lot of gaps in the feature sets when compared to BB when it comes to management. In short corporate management of BBs was bliss compared to the new world order...

The single solitary reason BB is losing in the enterprise is because the higher ups hated BBs because... well because they sucked.

IT didn't embrace iPhones and Android, they were simply forced to deal with them. No amount of bullshit could convince a CEO that his BB 9900 was good enough compared to an iPhone...

Point being that the identity of BB10 is (at least initially I hope) "good enough to stop the bleeding", i.e. it isn't embarrassingly bad, its actually good enough that your CEO won't mind using it.

Granted, it's probably too late for that now at a lot of companies (like mine). If you already started down the road of BYOD and are managing iPhones and Androids (as painful as that is) then BB is dead to you - they f*cking took too long. You can't unpop the bubble. But it might be enough to stop the bleeding at some of they companies that have managed to hold out this long.

Given a few years, if the user experience is good enough and you start hearing wonderful stories about how much easier the BB shops have it then everyone else... You never know, you could see a resurgence. But the absolutely best they can hope for, imo, is to just stop the bleeding...

ps. That is purely an enterprise viewpoint. BB doesn't have a prayer in the consumer space unless they take a seriously large amount of market share back in the enterprise space. That is the only reason they were ever even moderately popular to begin with - because consumers wanted what the big boys used. For BB, enterprise adoption drives consumer sales, not the other way around.

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