BlackBerry To Allow Rivals To Manage Its Smartphones 43
jfruh (300774) writes "BlackBerry broke its longstanding business model recently by announcing that its BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 management platform would be able to manage not just BlackBerry devices, but Android and iOS gadgets as well. Now, in a new announcement, the company is also exploring the flipside of that coin, allowing software from other companies to manage BlackBerry phones. The moves acknowledge a world in which fewer and fewer people are interested in a vertical BlackBerry solution — but also seem to kill the last things that make BlackBerry special."
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Re:its actually pretty great news. (Score:4, Interesting)
BES was always finicky, but generally issues I recall seeing tended to be self inflicted. Im not sure what you mean by "they changed cryptography keys"-- the entire point of the BES is that the company alone holds the per-device keys, and if they change its because someone did something with their profile.
Calling BES awful when there basically werent any viable competitors for ~10 years is a bit ridiculous. Sure there was activesync, but that was even more finicky and screwed up, and until recently (last ~5 years) anything else was just a nightmare to manage. Anyone ever have the joy of trying to get an iPhone 3 hooked up to a server with a self-signed cert?
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Death throes .. (Score:5, Insightful)
RIM/BlackBerry has been in decline for years.
The stuff they played a role in pioneering are now pretty much commodities. They rested on their laurels for way too long, and eventually got lapped by the rest of the market. Apple and Android have huge market shares compared to what BlackBerry still has.
They've been laying off people, closing buildings, and putting out products hardly anybody buys, and they've been saddled with ineffective management for years.
They're well on their way to becoming a footnote. Their founders all got rich and moved on.
What we're watching is the dying days of a once cool company.
Sad to see them go, but this is largely a mess of their own creation, even if they don't realize it.
I know people who owned their PlayBook tablet -- and, quite frankly, they were crap. There was nothing in the store, their Android support was a joke, and then they stopped giving updates for it. I'm betting most of the people who ever owned that tablet wouldn't ever own another product from them.
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Current blackberry products would surprise you. Android support is basically 100%, minus anything proprietary from google. The features offered on them are similar to what you'd expect from a decent smartphone.
I use current BB products, issued by my company. And they do surprise me. As in "why the hell is my company spending good money on junk like this?!?" Similar to a decent smartphone? Hardly. The ones with real keyboards are glorified feature phones. And those of use that want a decent smartphone will buy one from a decent smartphone vendor.
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I use current BB products, issued by my company. And they do surprise me. As in "why the hell is my company spending good money on junk like this?!?" Similar to a decent smartphone? Hardly. The ones with real keyboards are glorified feature phones. And those of use that want a decent smartphone will buy one from a decent smartphone vendor.
Since you didn't specify what device you are using I will assume from your comment you are using a BB OS 7 device which the OP indicated was a several years old device. I highly doubt you are are using a BB OS 10 device since current gen BB OS 10 phones (even the Z10 is over a year old.) can run the bulk of Android apps while maintaining the devices security. The Z30 uses the same Snapdragon S4 Pro chip as the Moto X and a host of other devices meaning it can hang with the big dogs just fine. BlackBerry has
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Partnering with Foxconn, introducing the Z3, the device management moves described here, BBM on all platforms, etc, are just a few.
BlackBerry remains unrivalled in device secur
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Blackberries excel in the security arena. While someone puts an iPhone on airplane mode and runs off with it, a Blackberry can be set to erase itself if it doesn't get a network connection in a certain time interval. No other platform offers this assurance.
Blackberries also used their own servers. Servers secure enough that countries demanded RIM give them access or else kick them out of the country. No wayward CAs, no bogus certs... it may not be perfect, but BIS is/was a secure way of doing mail.
BES,
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The thing is, the smartphone market is now mature. Blackberry are small fish in a big pond.
I worked in an establishment where all the senior managers had Blackberries. They couldn't connect them to Exchange email accounts, so when the time came, all the senior managers switched to iPhones which worked out of the box. Over time, they got used to and started to like the whole Android and iOS ecosystem. I know man other organizations went through the same process (perhaps switching to Android instead, or Windo
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Pretty much. wife's iphone has issues with email sync, my andriod has issues with gmail spying. The work BB? It just works. It does only what it's supposed to do; encrypted email, BBM and reading word/ppt/pdf documents. I agree, it's shit for anything else, but I'm not doing anything else on the work phone. It's good for security, and that's why I got stuck with it? Would I use one for my personal phone? Hell no. However, that's not the market or the point of it. We had one get stolen in china last month, m
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I remember when RIM was a smallish company operating mostly out of one office. I remember watching RIM soar and become huge. And I've spent several years watching them decline, the founders leave, and management floundering. I've known several people who worked there over the years.
Do I claim to be Warren Buffet and know exactly what will happen to them? Of course not.
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The PlayBook fiasco made me sad because it was so good. OS is way better even now than Android on the same size hardware, and the PB hardware was great, if a little unexciting.
Everything you say about the store and Android and support is correct. Which meant that the platform as a whole is useless except for limited situations (we still use ours for reading ebooks and browsing, but that's about it) but the gizmo itself was anything but crap.
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Kill it? (Score:2)
Presumably the same management options as before will still exist, you'll just be able to use other software to actually set those options, should it please you. If the actual security of the management process depended on the APIs being secret than it was horribly broken long ago (reverse-engineering a proprietary system well enough to build a competing application is
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This is the real issue.
If you're not already an all BlackBerry shop, or you're not big enough that you can dedicate resources to running BES in addition to your other solution, you need a different solution to manage your mobile devices before someone loses a phone on a plane and you're writing HIPAA checks.
None of the good multi-platform enterprise class solutions support BlackBerry
So you implement Mobile Iron as your one mobile management solution, and tell people they can't have a BlackBerry if they want
License the keyboard (Score:5, Interesting)
That might produce some additional revenue. They're suing the makers of a look a like solution for the iphone. Why not just take a cut of everyone that wants to do it, and help them do it as well? It might revitalize physical keyboard handsets.
They're still special (Score:4, Interesting)
but also seem to kill the last things that make BlackBerry special.
You think the competing management platforms driven to be as generic as possible and manage multiple vendors' phones will be "better" at managing BB devices, than their own product?
I see a few ways this may not hurt BB... (1) It makes their smartphones more attractive, if they will be compatible with customers' existing management solution.
(2) Potential licensing fees from developers of management software for access to SDKs and advanced APIs.
and (3) They may still provide superior manageability/functionality for their own management platform, by using undocumented APIs, or by introducing new APIs to their devices and management platform simultaneously --- so they always leverage new management and security features first..
Put a fork in it.... (Score:2)
BB is done. Some of their new products are interesting but BB has been irrelevant for too long. At one time they made the best smartphone on the market, certainly the most secure. Then they got fat and lazy and Apple and Android sped past them.
I had one of the older BB phones with the small screen and physical keyboard. Loved it. Great battery life, good call quality, secure. But no apps to speak of. Poor quality handsets (I know a lot of people that had to return them due to hardware failures). Then I got
*made* Blackberry special (Score:2)
"...but also seem to kill the last things that make BlackBerry special."
Shouldn't that be made Blackberry special? I mean, I loved my old crackberry as much as the next geek back-in-the-day... but pretty nearly everyone has moved on, at this point.