Windows Phone – Berry picking

Growing preference for Windows Phone spells the end for Blackberry.

• After a difficult few months there is at last some good news for Windows Phone.
• The appeal of Windows Phone to the enterprise is proving to be strong to the point where good customer preference is emerging.
• IBM, one of the pre-eminent enterprise IT suppliers, has found that many of its customers would prefer to use Windows Phone as their mobile platform of choice. (see here).
• The reason is pretty simple.
• When a Windows Phone is connected to the Microsoft exchange server within an enterprise the experience for both the user and the IT administrator is truly seamless.
• RFM has tested Windows Phone connected to exchange as well as to Google and other methods for getting corporate data onto the mobile device.
• In RFM’s opinion, the experience with Windows Phone and exchange is orders of magnitude better than anything else (with the exception of specialist offerings such as Good, AirWatch and MobileIron).
• However, all of these offerings require the enterprise to pay extra for and to implement these solutions whereas Windows Phone works out of the box.
• In addition to advanced enterprise features for the worker, the device also supports features such as secure boot protocols, data compartmentalization (aka, sandboxing) and data encryption that IT administrators love.
• This does nothing to fix the issues around the consumer ecosystem, but it makes Windows Phone a compelling offering for anyone who is running Microsoft infrastructure within their company.
• In the world today, that is almost everyone.
• This is very bad news for Blackberry which has trying to affect a rescue by refocusing on the enterprise.
• It has a great installed base (declining fast) but the current server most enterprises use needs to be swapped out for a new one.
• This combined with the fact that very few employees actually want a Blackberry device makes it an easy choice to switch off BES and use Windows Phone.
• This combined with the ever-improving offerings for Bring-Your-Own-Device offered on Android and iOS spells the end for Blackberry.
• The solution is inferior, more complicated to set up and the users don’t even like the devices that much.
• This is why I am forecasting that Blackberry’s smartphone market share will have fallen to 0.4% by the end of this year and that its ecosystem will be a shadow of its former self at 34.4m users.
• RFM calculates that the break-up value of BlackBerry is only $4.37 per share and that’s before all the cash has been burned in the rescue attempt.
• Anyone holding on for a recovery is likely to be very disappointed.