Well the title is a little far fetched but as the response to Mr Mobile’s (aka Jason Langridge) post points out you can see that the timing of this RIM’s announcement is not very well thought out. For those of you out there who didn’t hear about the outage: basically, RIM had a massive outage on their North American Blackberry network which meant those addict users had to go without their hit for around 8 hours. Jason has more information in his follow up post regarding the event.
Ok, so with that in mind RIM has come out and announced that they are going to have a version of their application deployment and device management software that will run on the Windows Mobile 6 platform. Hmmm, ok so let me get this straight – I’m going to invest in a Windows Mobile device and then sign up for a service which might not respond for 8 hours, and when the network operator realises that there’s an issue they issue a “sorry for the disturbance” message? I couldn’t think of a worse time to make this anouncement.
The other thing to think about is that RIM is definitely not the first to play in this application deployment (for mobile device) space:
- SAP – Mobile Infrastructure
- Citrix – Virtualizing Application Delivery
And if you widen the scope to looking at device support there are a whole host of players such as i-mate that have their own device management suites. Of course in Exchange 2007 we now have self-service device lock and wipe which in a large propotion of cases is half the battle!