The April 25th Wall Street Journal has an excellent cover article by Mark Heinzl on the history of Research in Motion (RIM) and the emerging market battle where Nokia, Motorola, Microsoft, and PalmOne are attempting to challenge RIM's dominance in wireless email. (Sorry, no public links available). Here is a quote:
More than 42,000 organizations have a BlackBerry e-mail server and 2.5 million people keep the gadget within arm's reach. The Los Angeles Police Department issues BlackBerries to some of its officers. Former Vice President Al Gore has one, as does Oprah Winfrey.
RIM commands a $12.4 billion market valuation. It has made tycoons of Co-Chief Executive Officers Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, who found success after years of sometimes quixotic effort.
Awakened by RIM's achievement, tech giants and hungry upstarts are responding with an arsenal of gear aimed at cracking the BlackBerry's stronghold. Consumer-electronics companies such as Nokia Corp., Motorola Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. are rolling out competing e-mail devices. Meanwhile, rivals are providing network software designed to intercept or block the revenue RIM generates from handling wireless e-mail traffic.
I think the article missed the point and missed the important emerging market battle. Here is the letter I sent to the editor:
To the Editor:
In response to the excellent overview of the wireless email marketplace (April 25 article by Mark Heinzl) and Research in Motion and its BlackBerry products, I'd like to suggest that your coverage addresses a war that is over. Wireless email is a must-have for any serious contender in the wireless data market. Microsoft, Nokia, PalmOne and the others still need to quickly duplicate RIM's features and ease-of-use if they are to be taken seriously. In the next five years tens of millions of mobile workers will conduct routine daily business transactions via hand-held devices. The next wave of wireless market growth will be driven by companies who move beyond email to support line-of-business applications -- using handheld devices to replace paper and laptops.
The return on investment from wireless email is weak. Businesses with mobile workers -- delivery drivers, repair technicians, inspectors, insurance adjusters, healthcare workers, sales people, and so on -- are aggressively looking for ways to improve productivity and customer service while reducing the enormous overhead of paper forms and voice calls transmitting routine business data. Unlike wireless email, more timely data and more efficient mobile business transactions show immediate payback. Return on investment for wireless business applications can easily exceed $500 per month per mobile worker. Based on their announcements at last weeks annual "Wireless Enterprise Symposium", RIM is focused on this emerging growth driver. Are Microsoft, Nokia, and PalmOne?
Beyond the device manufacturers and device software, the wireless carriers like Nextel, Verzion Wireless. Sprint, T-Mobile, and Cingular have much to say about what applications are delivered to business users. Nextel, for example, has developed a sophisticated software support infrastructure including location tracking features. Similarly, Verizon Wireless has focused on selling BlackBerrys for sophisticated business applications. Because RIM has aggressively courted a broad group of carriers with compatible and affordable devices, they are in a position to provide a unified software development experience to software vendors and therefore a rich library of business software applications. Right now, no one else provides the optimal combination of affordable and flexible device, standardized software platform, and support across many carriers. The challenge for the carriers is to differenciate and become "intelligent pipes" effectively moving front-line business data between their customer's mobile workers and enterprise software systems.
Will the preferred hand-held devices five years from now be descendants of today's BlackBerry or someone else's mobile software and platform? Which wireless carriers will provide value add to delivering business data to mobile workers? What are the crucial software and hardware features that deliver on the promise of mobile business data? These are the battlefields to watch. I lead a company that provides wireless software for many different device manufacturers and carriers. In the overall wireless ecosystem, we see wireless business applications having a far larger impact on mainstream business customers than wireless email.
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