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Home > Mobile Computing News > BackBerry's software chief discusses serving consumers and enterprises |
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That's why RIM had a strong presence at Interop 2008 in New York last week, complete with a keynote and a prime booth real estate. It even had a few elusive Bolds to show off. "The reason we're at this show is to make sure the IT audience knows we have not forgotten about our enterprise roots," said Yach, RIM's CTO of software. The crossover success, Yach said, should not come as a surprise, and it means good news for everyone when it comes to everything from the quality of applications delivered to work-life balance to the surprising form factors of RIM's latest creations. "The observation is that every employee of a company is a consumer, and most consumers have a job," Yach said. "We're finding that the mobile device, the BlackBerry, has become an extension of the person, and a person has two parts of their life, and they need some of both of those on their device." The trend is industry-wide: The iPhone, largely seen as a consumer-centric phone at launch, has started supporting enterprise-oriented features like better security, while Nokia's latest devices make it easier to jump from professional to personal device profiles. Yach said the two use cases still share one central demand, despite their differences. "Voice is still the killer application for mobile phones," he said. "We've certainly seen, in hindsight, a great deal more success as we changed voice from being an add-on application to being a compelling experience, to the point that many people say this is the best phone they've ever had." As the BlackBerry moves beyond voice and its original mainstay, mobile e-mail, RIM has run into some unexpected challenges, especially in educating users about what else the platform can do. On the enterprise side, RIM has been trying to help third-party developers better understand how to move line-of-business applications from a 21-inch screen to a 2-inch one. "Part of the reason we're developing SAP for the BlackBerry [is] we have a lot of customers who want SAP, but we also want to show what it means to thoughtfully mobilize an application," Yach said. "The usage model is different; it's one to two minutes of active use at a time, instead of sitting in front of a PC for half an hour." RIM's consumer software development organization faces the opposite problem, Yach said. "The bigger challenge on the consumer side, quite frankly, is making sure people's expectations are properly set," Yach said. "On the IT environment, you have sophisticated people who understand technology and have a better sense of its limitations." Consumers, on the other hand, hear a lot of misleading information about what is or should be possible on cell phones today, Yach said. "All of us in the industry are working to make it true tomorrow, but part of the challenge is to make sure we have the right expectations in the market [for] what we can do and can't do," he said. Pushing form factor helps on both fronts Part of making that tomorrow possible is the form factor. Having started as a pager company, Yach said RIM has a rich legacy of pushing different device types. "We're continuing to look into form factors and ergonomics, and trying to find and keep the magic balance that makes a really compelling device," he said. He said that many products, like the new Pearl Flip 8220 come from a "very high-level definition." "The Pearl was, how small can you make it? [Flip 8220] was what can you do with a flip?" he said. "So the motivation was different for each product." The same might be said for the much rumored touch-screen Thunder, which Yach declined to discuss. Throughout all aspects of development, hardware and software, professional and consumer, Yach said RIM has tried to stick with the core principles that made BlackBerry popular. "We try to apply the same principals that led us to be best of class in security, email [and] battery life and apply those elsewhere, whether it's media or Facebook or maps," he said. It's a policy he doesn't see changing. "I don't know that I see any major shakeups. We're going to continue looking at where the market is and what consumers want."
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