The Blue Ocean that once was.

The Blackberry initially launched a decade ago as a two way messaging device. It was an example of an all in one convergent device which had the convenience of push email and internet built into a mobile phone. Research in Motion the manufacturers of the Blackberry devices, where the first to explore the blue ocean of push mails. When the email is received with user connecting to the server at regular intervals (manually/pre-defined intervals) it would be called as pull-service. Push mail feature is called so for obvious reasons as it pushes the emails to the hand held device instantaneously without the user needing to connect to the server manually.

In an era when ‘staying connected’ was the mantra of success, it became inevitable that every corporate officer, technology geek and wannabe successful sales personal own a blackberry device, even if that meant a big hole was being fired in their pockets. The blackberry device soon became a symbol of status and power. In the beginning push mails and the internet worked only in devices that were blackberry enabled and the user had to subscribe to RIM’s blackberry service.

With the coming of Microsoft into the world of email servers and mobile operating systems push mail is now made available to even non blackberry users. Any mobile enabled with push mail capability can now connect to the Microsoft exchange server through a simple GPRS connection, without having to subscribe to RIM’s blackberry service. The BB service is at least 5 times costlier than a simple GPRS service.

At this point in time the 128 key encryption of emails and messages, being provided by RIM is the only differentiator between a BB service and any other email service provided by RIM’s competitors at a much lower charge. The high level of encryption alone cannot be the reason for such high subscription fee.

 

The blue ocean of push mails that once was is now all red with many new players in the market, providing push emails and more advanced email clients on mobile devices. Apart from push emails there are other features that are being provided by RIM through their bb service, but push email being the most important selling feature it alone has been considered for this write up.