Pieter Knook, Senior VP for Microsoft Talks About How Microsoft is Ready to Take on RIM

[Jerry Raia]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.microsoft.com/msft/speech/FY05/KnookFAM2005.mspx' target='_blank'>http://www.microsoft.com/msft/speech/FY05/KnookFAM2005.mspx</a><br /><br /></div><i>"...this audience, particularly from a personal usage standpoint, is a challenging one for us. It's the one that uses a lot of BlackBerry products, and I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about how we're going to compete for mobile information workers, such as many of you sitting in this room. And there are many elements to that competition, the first of which is a focus on how do we do as a business and how our business model works. When you look at how we've been doing, you see a lot of growth, but the growth as a business has many components to it; the connected devices component, for example, to our overall business has been growing much faster. You'll see in a subsequent slide I talk about 150 percent growth just in that connected device segment, which is one of the key elements."</i><br /><br />This of course makes me very happy because I don't have too much affection for RIM. It is a long piece and there is a PowerPoint presentation as well if you are interested. I think Microsoft will win this contest in the end because of the compatibility with the desktop. What do you think?

[Kris Kumar]

I am impressed. :)

But will wait for the comments from the Exchange users/administrators. ;-)

[GadgetDave]

This of course makes me very happy because I don't have too much affection for RIM.

Why not?

I'm a huge PocketPC fan and user, but frankly, I won't leave home without my blackberry. I've been a user since very early (the older models that looked like pagers, had no phone, and ran on the Mobitex network), and even then they were amazing. They did all that on a 9600 bps network - forget GPRS/EDGE or 1xRTT. They integrate with the exchange environment seamlessly, are easy for end users to understand, don't hard-reset if you run the battery down (and the battery life, even with phone on and bluetooth on, is like 6-7 DAYS ... on the old ones I'd get 2 weeks!). Frankly, the PPC world isn't close to competing yet.

Sure, I get no MP3s and less 3rd party software, but there is some and more coming, now that they're java based. And I have a web browser that works better than PIE, and since it runs off the BB server (inside the firewall) I can get to content on an intranet - and write apps on the web side specifically for the BB.

I have yet to hear a compelling argument about why the PPC/smartphone is "better."