Lets face it in the US RIM is loosing market share in droves. And what many of us had speculated all along has now been confirmed. Which is to say that iPhones have surpassed Blackberry's as the smartphone of choice in enterprises, and by a large margin. This has got to be very troubling news for RIM as enterprises and governments have been their bread and butter.
I think one way for them to help to turn things around would be to fully support Exchange ActiveSync on all of their devices. Get rid of the dependency on BES / BIS and the cost of the monthly enterprise service fee in order to use it. RIM is losing the market share anyway so why not? At least this way the people in the enterprises that want to use a blackberry can have it connected to the Exchange server just like they would an iPhone or any other smartphone without any extra cost or hardware overhead. For the businesses that want to continue to use BES they would still have that option to. To me this makes sense. Sure RIM will lose service revenue because the phones are no longer directly tied to their servers / network but like I said they are losing the market share anyway. When things get this bad you have to take drastic measures.
It is an interesting observation. How the economy is driving business decisions. Hmm let's see we have Exchange in place and we can allow people to bring their own devices (no cost to company) and allow them to get email and calendar etc...with no cost. Pretty much a no brainer for the enterprise......
However, BES should definitely stay for those needing the high security.
I wouldn't mind RIM keeping BIS, just build full EAS capability into it. And, provide it back to include OS 5 devices. After all, BIS can already connect to an exchange account for basic email access only. Just finish it out for full OTA syncing of everything.
Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com
