Watching the congress debate on the Syria crisis, I'm noticing a lot of politicians using blackberry's,so what the heck is the media preaching to the public??
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Watching the congress debate on the Syria crisis, I'm noticing a lot of politicians using blackberry's,so what the heck is the media preaching to the public??
sounds better to say they are going broke, losing business etc.....
They are reporting that they aren't selling well. Some years ago the US government got Blackberries for many Federal employees. Many of not most probably still carry them I suspect they are not BB10 yet. There aren't many people in Congress, although the number of Federal employees with BBs is a lot larger. Its not all Feds remember. Even that number is small compared to total people in the country.
Also, given the respect that the average American has for congress as a whole BB should probably pay them to not let people know they have one. And by the way, Obama has one too.
There are 535 members of Congress. Added to that there is approximately 25,000 congressional staffers. Not all of them are BlackBerry users and even if they were the total number of them would be truly insignificant in the scope of total smartphone users in the U.S.
I'm sure it is nice to see people in various settings using BlackBerry but the image of a member of Congress using one is about the same as seeing a Kardashian using one. Interesting to some but inconsequential at the end of the day.
Also, the media quite regularly points out the fact that BlackBerry is the choice of most governmental agencies and notes that that is one of it's great strengths, so I am not even sure why you are making a "media slant" issue of this.
Truer words have never been spoken. :)
What's interesting is that BlackBerry devices appear in some high profile movies recently, most notably "Olympus Has Fallen" which features Secret Service, politicians, military, terrorists, etc. Just about every character has one and it's part of the authenticity they tried to preserve in the movie - that if you're serious about security and work in the government in some capacity, you are probably using a BlackBerry. Too bad they were all old BB7 devices though :(
Beat me to it.
Just to clarify, there are 535 members of Congress, not 535 million.
Not necessarily. It could just mean that they were low bidder. Seriously, the VAST majority of government employees I know who have BBs have no real need for serious security.
I actually work in the U.S. federal government, and my agency (which I think has 5000+ employees in total around the U.S.) has been transitioning from Blackberry Bolds to iPhones over the last year. The majority of the staff who work for my agency do not have government-issued smartphones, but a decent number of staff do.
Incidentally, my agency also allows BYOD, but only allows iPhones to be used for BYOD purposes.
Sooo by definition of Bring Your Own Device your saying that your gov't agency will not let you Bring Your Own Device unless its an iPhone, no BB, no Android? So really they are discriminating against all other makes of phones and in actual fact it should be labeled BYOI. as in Bring your own iPhone to work policy.
What is their reasoning behind this? Send me a message as to what Dept. of Gov't you work in as I would like them to explain how they are phasing out BBOS7 phones and won't let you bring a newer BBOS10 phone to work
Yeah, I just caught that...and we think they get nothing done NOW :eek:
My agency originally allowed Android devices (and more generally devices that could connect via the corporate e-mail link that most/all? smartphone platforms have available - I have the question mark because I'm only familiar with the set-up in Android). In early-to-mid 2012 it stopped allowing people's personal devices to connect to work e-mail via the mobile OS' native connection and required work e-mail connections to be made through the Good for Enterprise application (which frankly isn't very good, but that's another story). Mobile operating systems that had the Good for Enterprise app (iOS and Android) could still connect. Then at the end of 2012 it discontinued support for Good for Enterprise in Android because of security concerns.
I think non-corporate BBOS devices were not allowed as BYODs because the network could not distinguish between agency-owned BBOS devices and employee-owned BBOS devices. (I personally would have liked to connect my Bold 9930 to the network, but could not do so; incidentally the agency did issue a number of Bold 9930s.)
I'm unsure what the agency's position on BB10 devices is. All of the changes I described above took place before BB10 devices were introduced. It is possible that Blackberry's delay in releasing BB10 devices caused my agency to go in a different direction with its "government-issued device" program.
Incidentally, my agency does not handle too much what I would consider sensitive, highly classified information. It DOES manage programs which cumulatively across the entire agency account for hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
Poker playing jesters.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...c-c0b0d9d4fe0a
Not my idea of the target demographic
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