By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Robert Earl Keen’s Farm Fresh Onions:
Well, the big news is that Microsoft has decided it has
what it takes to give Blackberry another
kick when it’s down.
It’s being widely reported in the early morning media, and
unfortunately this reporter doesn’t have the expense account required to stake
out the Barcelona GSM conference 24/7 and wine and dine Microsoft officials for
ye olde inside scoop, so let’s see what’s being said about the venture around
the world:
From the good ol’ U.S.A., the nation’s News McNuggets
vendor, USA Today, using an Associated
Press report:
“Microsoft Corp. has won backing from major cellular
networks for a new generation of phones designed to transform mobile e-mail from executive accessory to standard issue for
the corporate rank-and-file.
“The partnerships, with operators including Vodafone and
Cingular, to be announced Monday at a mobile industry gathering in Spain, could
spell more trouble for the embattled Blackberry and other niche e-mail
technologies, analysts say.”
Microsoft today announced that its Microsoft Connected
Services Framework has been adopted by more than a dozen of the world’s communications
companies, including Bell Canada, BT Retail and Celcom Malaysia. France Telecom
is currently trialing the product.
Introduced last year about this time, Connected Services
Framework is a software product that lets operators aggregate, provision and
manage converged communications services for their subscribers, regardless of
network or device.
So is Microsoft simply copying what others have done well, like
Macintosh, etc.? Evidently they’re adding a wrinkle here and there:
“Unlike the Blackberry and its peers, phones running
Microsoft’s latest Windows Mobile operating system can receive e-mails ‘pushed’
directly from servers that handle a company’s messaging – without the need for a separate mobile server
or additional license payments.”
The problem many see is that while Microsoft certainly has
the technology, and now, evidently, the desire to do well in this market,
there’s the issue of data security. RIM’s done pretty well in this, and
Microsoft… hasn’t. That’s a problem that’ll need to be overcome.
“IT decision makers’ experience of Microsoft hasn’t always
been a happy one, so there is some convincing to do there,” according to Andrew
Brown, an analyst with consultancy IDC.
Wired
News notes that “Vodafone is to sell the phones under its own brand, in a
joint marketing deal, targeting companies that already run Microsoft’s Exchange
software on their servers. Exchange is the collaborative glue behind Microsoft’s
popular Outlook application, which manages appointments and electronic address
books in addition to e-mail.
“Together with Cingular Wireless, Orange and T-Mobile,
Vodafone will also deliver phone software upgrades to subscribers who are
already running the Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system on their smart phones.”
The New York Post
has an original article, not simply a reprint of the AP feed, they say… hm,
they say you have to register to read it, skip it. The Sydney Morning Herald says… says they run the AP feed.
Microsoft itself announced T-Mobile Netherlands and IS
Interned Services’s upcoming availability of “new professional e-mail packages
for small and medium-sized businesses based on the Microsoft Solution
for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration version 3.5.”
T-Mobile will upgrade to the Messaging
and Security Feature Pack for Windows Mobile 5.0-based devices, making it possible
to offer hosted e-mail services on Windows Mobile-based T-Mobile MDA
Smartphones.
T-Mobile Netherlands will provide MDA Smartphones and the
GPRS network, and Microsoft Certified Partner and Internet service provider IS
Interned Services will host the Exchange infrastructure for the Microsoft Solution
for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration version 3.5, including the maintenance
and support of the e-mail service.
Ah, here we go, finally, some original reporting. Industry
observer Ina
Fried says Microsoft’s optimistic that “although Microsoft is offering push
e-mail abilities later than some mobile specialists, such as Research In Motion
and Good Technology, the company says the numbers are still on its side.”
Sure, just like numbers were on its side against Netscape
too.
“Although there are a billion mobile phones and 400 million
Outlook e-mail users worldwide, only about 10 million people are getting their
corporate e-mail delivered to their phones,” Fried says. Light bulbs went off
all over Redmond:
“We look at the universe out there and we know there is just
a huge, huge opportunity yet to be met,” Microsoft vice president Suzan DelBene
told Fried in a telephone interview. Push e-mail is what gets forwarded as it
comes in on the server, as opposed to pull e-mail, in which a user has to
manually retrieve e-mail or get it at a certain time.”
Microsoft has been promising push e-mail for some time, as
Fried says, “but it has taken a while to get all the pieces in place. The
technology was made possible by combining devices running Windows Mobile 5 with
servers using Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2. The final piece, a messaging and
security service pack, was shipped last year, but had yet to show up on devices
in the market.”
Microsoft says a number of carriers, including Amena,
Chungwa Telecom, Cingular Wireless, Orange, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon and
Vodafone are offering free upgrades for customers that will allow them to get
the “Direct Push” e-mail abilities as well as new security features, according
to Fried.
There are those who say Blackberry’s demise was in Microsoft’s
October update to Exchange. Strand Consult, a Denmark-based IT research house, the
AP reports, “expects companies worldwide to invest in much broader mobile
e-mail access for their employees in 2006.
“At the end of the year, many will be asking themselves
whether they really needed a Blackberry handset from RIM to check mail, and RIM
might be asking themselves what went wrong,” Strand wrote in a research note
seen by the AP, adding “Microsoft will most probably overtake RIM as the
leading mobile e-mail provider.”
…
A friend of mine writes
in to say “So, is he the first guy to be elected vice-president and later
shoot a guy since… Aaron Burr?”
Maybe,
but Alexander Hamilton only wishes Aaron Burr was using quail shot.
…
MobileAware,
a mobile data services vendor, is announcing a partnership with InFact Group, a
global technology consulting organization specializing in Customer Relationship
Management, to help companies extend their existing CRM systems, such as Siebel
CRM OnDemand.
The
idea is to provide mobile field force employees a real-time snapshot of
customer interactions from any mobile device.
InFact
Group will use MobileAware’s device-tailored content rendering technology to
provide customers, particularly in financial service, travel and manufacturing
industries with what company officials call “a low-risk product” to use the
data contained in their installed CRM systems.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
