Another big customer gives up Blackberry
When President Obama began his first term, he famously clung to his Blackberry. FBI agents and military higher-ups have been glued to theirs, too.
“The reason they’ve done so well in the government agencies has been security,” says Eric Jackson at Iron Fire Capital in Toronto. The Canadian maker of the Blackberry — Research in Motion, or RIM — has counted on government contracts as other smartphones overtake it in the corporate market.
Blackberry phones are secure, in part, because they don’t have tons of bells and whistles, or third-party apps. But you know that awful saying “good enough for government work”? Well, now some say Blackberry’s not even suited for that.
“Even in the government,” Jackson says, “people today want certain types of functionality that they haven’t been able to get from the Blackberry.”
Government has stuck with Blackberry this long mostly out of habit. “It tends to hold onto technologies for longer, and to be slower to adopt new ones,” says Roger Kay at Endpoint Technologies.
So if agencies like the National Transportation Safety Board don’t want to wait for the new Blackberry, due out this January, that is a really bad sign.
Plus, Kay says Apple and Google have stormed Capitol Hill without even really trying.
“The employees bring in their own devices and say, ‘Hey, I want to use this.’ The BYOD movement, Bring Your Own Device,” he says.
The iPad hurts Blackberry’s chances, too. Government agencies already using Apple’s tablet may switch to iPhones for compatibility.
Rumors about the Blackberry company, RIM, don’t help. “Hard for a government agency to make a decision and say, “we’re definitely going to choose RIM,” when some people are suggesting that it might not even be around,” says Ryan Kim, en editor at GigaOm.
But the company still claims 80 million users worldwide. In some countries, like Nigeria and South Africa, a Blackberry remains a high-power status symbol, though experts I talked to were hard-pressed to say why. Like many devices or platforms before it, Blackberry will likely hang on in far-flung corners of the world, even as it disappears in the U.S.
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