After significant delays RIM - now renamed as Blackberry - has launched it's Blackberry 10 (BB10) operating system - or as the company refers to - a platform. Reviews are genuinely positive with the biggest criticism coming for lack of apps (see e.g. Walt Mossbergs (@waltmossberg) column here) and questions if the new phones (the N10 and Q10) combined with the platform will be enough to entice new smartphone users to drop their phones and move to Blackberry and thus stem the dramatic decline in market share the Blackberry brand has seen in the last years.
But how does BB10 matter to the enterprise?
What makes BB10 unique is that it was developed by a company who's culture and values are deeply rooted in providing the best R&D efforts - without taking shortcuts. Accepting even company endangering delays (sic!) before shipping something incomplete / not ready. An previous example for the company's commitment to R&D is, how the then RIM, re-wrote the 3g subsystem - while all competitors took them from the shelf. This is why when you land in a different country, your Blackberry will in 99% have you on a 3g network faster than your iOS, Android or Windows device. Or how the Blackberrys "claws" to the next closest antenna, when competitive smartphones have lost signal a long time before.
Moreover, BB10 supporting real multi-tasking is something that was missing in other smartphone platforms. It offers process separation and runs every program as a reloadable process. We know that iOS and Android 'could' support multitasking, but say they don't, to avoid battery drain. Windows Phone 7 used a similar argument. But shouldn't the 21st century smartphone user have the choice? Run more applications and have less battery or less application and preserve battery? I have never seen a laptop maker using the same argument.... but the same mechanics apply to a laptop battery and CPU usage.
Finally, very little has been reported of the fundamental different nature of BB10 coming from it's QNX roots. While the other smartphone OS have a large microkernel, BB10 has one of the smallest kernels (Neutrino) for any commercial OS out there. In fact Neutrino is so small it fits into the L1 cache of the CPU. At the end of the day this boils down to an OS that can efficiently and easily connect to messages (data) that are on different devices. You can see this already on the Blackberry Playbook to some extent, with the video chat capability. Or with the great support for products like Dropbox in BB10.
And next to the 'fundamental engineering' DNA of now Blackberry, the company is deeply rooted in the B2B world, where security, productivity and reliability matter. Take all this together and you will find a technically very competitive smartphone OS. And more competition on ideas and concepts keeps all participants on the toes, making sure we see innovation across all smartphone vendors.
But how does BB10 matter to the enterprise?
Blackberry is (still) a force in the enterprise
As Dennis Howlett (@dahowlett) points out there is still significant market share of Blackberry in the enterprise (see here). Quite a number of CIOs will look at this as the chance to offer a smartphone that is regarded as "at par" to the most modern iOS and Android devices. As we all know, IT never likes to loose control - also because IT professionals sense, that they will be blamed in case of an issue afterwards. And many IT executives have not forgotten that most iOS devices found their way into their company 'top down': An executive wanted an iPad (or often just bought one) and IT had to make it work. In todays corporate culture it wasn't long that iOS devices could be kept from lower management levels and thus mushroomed across the enterprises, creating a few headaches. Blackberry reacted with opening BES to manager other devices, and today has significant administration options for non Blackberry devices (see e.g. here). But that wasn't enough to put a stop to the loss of mind share and market share. Now IT not only has a good MDM functionality, but also at least 'good enough' devices to give to their employees to re-establish control lost through the BYOD trend.Innovation matters
Seldom a completely new platform is offered in the smartphone market place. In the last 10 years we only saw 5 platforms making it to the market - iOS, Android, Palm, Windows and now BB10. Palm's WebOS is long gone and somewhere sitting on HP's books being written down. If you then consider that iOS developed from the iPod age further to today's iPhones, granted with a lot of additions, it brings the number of built from scratch smartphone operating systems (OS) even further down. But even counting iOS - we only see a new smartphone OS make it to them market every 2-3 years since the turn of the century.What makes BB10 unique is that it was developed by a company who's culture and values are deeply rooted in providing the best R&D efforts - without taking shortcuts. Accepting even company endangering delays (sic!) before shipping something incomplete / not ready. An previous example for the company's commitment to R&D is, how the then RIM, re-wrote the 3g subsystem - while all competitors took them from the shelf. This is why when you land in a different country, your Blackberry will in 99% have you on a 3g network faster than your iOS, Android or Windows device. Or how the Blackberrys "claws" to the next closest antenna, when competitive smartphones have lost signal a long time before.
Moreover, BB10 supporting real multi-tasking is something that was missing in other smartphone platforms. It offers process separation and runs every program as a reloadable process. We know that iOS and Android 'could' support multitasking, but say they don't, to avoid battery drain. Windows Phone 7 used a similar argument. But shouldn't the 21st century smartphone user have the choice? Run more applications and have less battery or less application and preserve battery? I have never seen a laptop maker using the same argument.... but the same mechanics apply to a laptop battery and CPU usage.
Finally, very little has been reported of the fundamental different nature of BB10 coming from it's QNX roots. While the other smartphone OS have a large microkernel, BB10 has one of the smallest kernels (Neutrino) for any commercial OS out there. In fact Neutrino is so small it fits into the L1 cache of the CPU. At the end of the day this boils down to an OS that can efficiently and easily connect to messages (data) that are on different devices. You can see this already on the Blackberry Playbook to some extent, with the video chat capability. Or with the great support for products like Dropbox in BB10.
And next to the 'fundamental engineering' DNA of now Blackberry, the company is deeply rooted in the B2B world, where security, productivity and reliability matter. Take all this together and you will find a technically very competitive smartphone OS. And more competition on ideas and concepts keeps all participants on the toes, making sure we see innovation across all smartphone vendors.
BB10 features that matter to the enterprise
Here is a list of features that IMHO are key differentiators for BB10:- Given Blackberry's security DNA - it's the first smartphone OS that provides complete isolation between corporate and private content on a device. In today's world not allowing your employee to use a company issued smartphone for private needs beyond the call home - is not acceptable. On the flip side employees respect the privacy needs of companies to protect their proprietary data. Yes, there are a number of MDM vendors out there who say they can do the same - but I still prefer this to be a capability of the OS.
Let me illustrate this: If your employer offers you a smartphone that will reliably prevent a wipe of your private data in case of a separation event (from your smartphone or from the employer) - versus the scenario where you can only rely on the 'best effort' of a MDM vendor, what would be your choice? Anyone who has experienced a remote wipe of their smartphone knows how traumatic that experience can be and may likely opt for BB10. - Blackberry's productivity DNA comes through on many features of BB10:
- The BB10 Hub gives a user the power of a unified inbox. Anyone every having worked with the simpler inbox on the Blackberry OS7 devices will likely look forward to it. But there is a learning curve for anyone used to the notification mechanism of iOS and Android devices. BB10 will also have to find ways to filter messages more efficiently - e.g. you don't want to always see all tweets in between your emails. But it's a fundamentally different starting point to how information is presented and processed than in the other smartphone OS in the marketplace. .
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| BB10 Hub (from TechRadar) |
- No Blackberry without a great keyboard. While the Blackberry Q10 with the physical keyboard isn't out yet - the reviews of the virtual keyboard of the Z10 are very positive. Finally a keyboard that can learn and anticipate what the next word will be. As will all disruptive innovations - it will take some time to get used to it, some reviews only speak of a few hours, which is encouraging..
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| BB Keyboard with word prediction (from Blackberry) |
- No 'Home' button anymore... call me Tayloresque - but why do I have to take my finger of the touchscreen area, to press a button and then move back to the touch screen area for the next step? Not efficient and if Steve Jobs would still be alive I wonder what his take on this design would be. As a side effect - it's esthetically more pleasing and allows more real estate to what really matters - the screen.
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| No Home Button (from Computerwelt DE) |
- Given the multitasking advantage - the peek gesture that allows you to see what messages, calls etc you have - from every app - brings a known PC feature to the smartphone. No longer you loose the content and context by pressing a home button, loading the app(s) you want to check and then return to where you had been...
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| BB10 Peek (from TechRadar) |
- The browser has long been the achilles heel of Blackberry devices, BB10 brings in a new browser (based on webkit) and is the only smartphone browser to support Adobe's Flash. This matters because despite all the hoopla around HTML5 - there is still a number of enterprise applications using flash out there (take the e.g. popular Workday HRMS apps).
- BB10's QNX base allows efficient message transfer - so there should be no surprise that BBM added video - and more importantly in the productivity field - screen sharing. Its not desktop sharing - where the view of the other device becomes the other desktop - but you can see content of both devices next to each other - unique for smartphones at this point.
- [Inserted] Additionally BB10 supports an 'Android player' that allows to run native Android apps in emulation mode. Early reports say that they don't perform as well as on a native Android platform - but that should not come as a surprise. This capability give enterprises the option to run Android apps on BB10 - reducing app licenses, management, support and maintenance costs. And just in: Blackberry announces to upgrade the player to the latest flavor of Android - Jelly Bean.