I just noticed that Vodafone, Optus, and Telstra have released a new version of BlackBerry Connect for the Palm Treo 650 in Austrailia and it just got me to thinking about why BlackBerry Connect is so scarce in the United States.
I understand that Research in Motion still makes dump truck loads of money off of device sales, however, it seems to me that monthly subscriber fees are the key to long term viability for the company as handsets will eventually become commodities.
RIM should take a page from Microsoft and worry not so much about which devices BlackBerry Connect runs on so long as it runs on 87 to 93% of all devices. I know that the carriers play a big role in this and they too should get the ball rolling on making BlackBerry Connect available on more devices.
Pretty simple: BB Connect is a shell of true BB devices. The carriers in the US would face customer support nightmare from people complaining about functionality, returning devices, etc.
Blackberry is really a hardware company like Nokia or Moto.
Ironically, it is the email service which gets commoditized, whereas the hardware business can continue as long as blackberries are the most efficient devices on the market in terms of battery life, functional use, and cost.
There’s was a hangover from the NTP lawsuit…American carriers were worried about the future of BlackBerry. Now it looks like American carriers don’t want to help extend BlackBerry dominance. If BlackBerry connect is on 90% of your Business devices, they’re basically driving business to RIM for free.