RE: Rolf Howarth
Rolf, you should read up on the nightmare of copyright to corporations. I work with sub-companies that are completely Linux through and through, but they retain and renew a few Microsoft licences just to ensure they can carry on using old M$ docs without the worry that at some point M$ will turn around and claim only M$ systems can read the old docs. It's cheaper than converting them all to PDFs, and doesn't risk data corruption during conversion. Many of these sub-companies also have policies that company equipment should not be used for non-work-related activities or storage, and very thorough systems for checking company laptops, desktops and servers for illicit material such as porn, MP3s and games. With RIM BES, we can extend this to the company handsets as well, and we can actually block all the handsets from playing or storing material such as MP3s (we're such killjoys!).
Another reason BES beats ActiveSync (at least for the customers) is that it is a real push technology - if there's no email waiting then you don't get billed for the polling you have to pay for with ActiveSync, which polls to find out if email is waiting. And if you're doing that polling via 3G then it's a data charge which is usually a higher tariff. We calculated that the average user was going to be THREE TIMES AS EXPENSIVE on Treos with ActiveSync compared to Blackberrys on BES, even taking into account the extra cost of the BES server and licences, which is probably why the operators are so happy to push ActiveSync.
And the final reason why I don't think iPlonker poses a threat to Blackberry is conformity. Many companies like standard builds - standard laptops, standard desktops, and standard company phones. This is why the iMac never made much of a dent in the business world outside of marketing departments, because the fanbois couldn't present a good enough argument to get businesses to switch. The iPhone faces the same hurdle - it will have to prove that it is better and cheaper for the business (not the fanboi) before it will be taken seriously. At the moment, ActiveSync is definitely not better, and iPhone is so ridiculously expensive that only a company looking to give employees a trendy perk might consider it, and then there are a dozen cheaper phones already available from Sony-Ericsson or Nokia that have better business capabilities and proven track records. The iPlonker has about a year to get some traction before M$ will be attacking it with a better phone OS which will probably be very closely tied to and therefore better with Exchange. I predict the iPlonker getting maybe 3% business marketshare and never beyond that amount, just like the iMac, for the simple reason that CIOs are usually not fanbois but businessmen.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
