The iPhone: No Threat to Blackberry

[BESadmin]

The iPhone: No Threat to Blackberry
23rd January 2007

I wanted to write a little screed to stamp down a particularly idiotic Internet meme: that because Apple's iPhone will push Yahoo! email, it is somehow a threat to RIM's Blackberry business.

That's like saying the new Ferrari sportscar is a threat to the white box truck in package delivery. It's mind-bogglingly stupid and shows absolutely no knowledge of the enterprise market.

Businesses buy Blackberries for the following reasons:

• Blackberries integrate easily with existing corporate e-mail and PIM servers, such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. The iPhone will not do this at all. Unless you are Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail is not a corporate email solution; most companies also do not use POP3/IMAP because they want the additional management and workgroup features of the corporate systems.
• Blackberries have excellent remote management, security, policy and provisioning features. Your corporate IT department can control what you do with your Blackberry, tweak every feature, block what they want to block and even wipe the device remotely.
• Blackberries have "no-fun options." Your average law firm does not want to buy a video iPod. It wants to buy a no-nonsense messaging device that does not encourage goofing off. The iPhone is basically imprinted with a gigantic neon light that says, "Goof off!"
• Blackberries respect that enterprises may have long-term carrier agreements with various wireless carriers, may want to accept multiple bids from multiple carriers, or otherwise leverage a competitive carrier landscape. With the iPhone, it's Cingular or nothing, which would put corporate business managers in a weak position to negotiate.

What I'm saying about RIM also holds for Motorola's Good Mobile Messaging product and for Windows Mobile. With the iPhone, Apple is trying to create a genuinely new market: the consumer entertainment smart phone. That's something that Motorola and Samsung, among others, have been taking stabs at -- and you may see the iPhone biting into individual consumer purchases of, say, the Motorola Q.

But the iPhone is absolutely no threat to RIM and Good's core enterprise business. And I see that as a very good thing: Apple isn't stealing pieces of the smartphone pie. They're trying to make the pie bigger for everyone.