![]() ![]() The broader implication is that employees understand the power of apps and, as John McCarthy and Michele Pelino of Forrester Research wrote back in 2011, “Corporate app stores become the intranet of the future.” As a result, an email experience optimized for battery life and efficient communication will always get trumped by a data experience optimized for breadth, richness, and beauty. Users also want a great browsing experience, lots of apps, a sophisticated screen, and intuitive touch navigation. Today, email is still the killer app for mobile business, but it is not enough. Making business email work so well with so little was a phenomenal feat. That’s because the earliest BlackBerry devices had to live with small monochrome displays, slow paging networks, 4MB flash memory, and one AA battery. The end-to-end BlackBerry solution, from display to keyboard to physical navigation to battery life to network connectivity, was designed to provide an optimized email experience that used minimal resources. Forbes even argued recently that the foreign bidding for BlackBerry may have the hidden motive of reducing customer confidence in the company.Įvery user loved BlackBerry email. Because of the current financial turmoil around the company, the BlackBerry NOC has arguably now become a liability for high security organizations because it is not clear what vendor or country will eventually control this critical component and the data that flows through it. ![]() As wireless networks improved and Microsoft’s ActiveSync became the standard protocol for push email, the value of the NOC diminished. However, the NOC also created a single point of failure outside the control of the enterprise. When external wireless networks were highly unreliable, the NOC delivery mechanism and proprietary BlackBerry protocol were necessary to provide push email, secure transmission, and measurable service quality. BlackBerry, then called Research in Motion, ran a NOC through which all corporate email traffic flowed. That means the smartphone needs to provide a consumer-grade experience, and any “enterprise” device that does not do so will not be used for work either.įrom 2000 to 2010, the network operations center (NOC) model of wireless email was the enterprise standard. Employees don’t want multiple phones, so they will use theirs for both personal and business use. Also, every smartphone in the workplace is a mixed-use device, regardless of who owns it or what IT policy has been set. If your mobile device vendor isn’t doing well with consumers, then that vendor will not be financially viable in the long term, because the economics of mobile device production and distribution are based on scale. ![]() If a smartphone (or tablet) is not successful in the consumer market, it will also not be successful in the enterprise market. Lesson 1: The enterprise smartphone is dead.Ĭonsumerization has won. Every CIO faces a tactical issue today of how and when to migrate from BlackBerry, but the strategy lessons and corresponding challenges are deeper and further reaching. My goal, however, is to step back and understand the broader implications of the BlackBerry story. Today, there is no shortage of pundits dissecting BlackBerry’s decline. ![]() The term “Crackberry” became so popular to describe the addictive nature of the service that it was selected as the 2006 Word-of-the-Year by Webster’s New World College Dictionary. Great email and great security were the hallmarks of the BlackBerry solution and no one else in the first decade of this millennium even came close to matching them. And, for IT departments, BlackBerry established a standard of security that protected even the most sensitive information with comprehensive policy support from a central management console. It gave us devices with batteries that lasted a full week, connectivity that made email feel real-time even over very slow networks, and a user experience that everyone LOVED. It made wireless email a killer app that every salesperson and traveling executive absolutely needed to have to get their work done. ![]()
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