Total BS

The Blackberry is an ingrained business tool. Its super feature is its push email feature. It lets you get email in real-time. That’s where the unique benefits begin and end. Its Internet is still only as fast as the network’s speed. Its interface is ok. Let’s just say it’s no iPhone. And the Blackberries themselves look nice, but not that special. Again, it’s no iPhone or an HTC Touch.

But for a corporate workplace that requires instantaneous communication, it can be a lifeline. Although to be perfectly frank, most of this “necessary” instantaneous communication, is overstated anyway. Unless you work for Bear Sterns and you’re trying to figure out whether you’ll have a job tomorrow because you invested a billion dollars in what you thought was a super hot sundial company, your life will probably not explode because you didn’t respond to an email the moment the shadows shifted. But whatever, if it’s paid by corporate money, it’s free, right?

I can count on zero fingers the number of people I know, who need to have their personal email pushed to them.

I can count on zero fingers the number of people I know, who run a small business that requires their email to be pushed to them.

It does take me a couple hands to count the number of people I know, who have a Blackberry. Many of these Blackberries are not company-paid.

So for the people with Blackberries that they’re paying out of their own pocket, I have to ask… why? Or to quote the immortal Ricky Watters, “for who? for what?”

This is the iPhone’s money melon. This is where it gobbles Blackberry market share. I doubt the iPhone will ever be an enterprise-standard - even with the planned Microsoft Exchange compatibility in version 2.0 - it just costs too much. I’ve learned that the bigger the company, the cheaper they are. It’s a direct inverse relationship, I kid you not. So until Apple starts giving those phones away with the plans, it’ll never be the dominant corporate player. But it doesn’t need to be. Apple doesn’t need to knock out RIMM in the corporate space, it’ll be just fine knocking out RIMM everywhere besides the corporate space.

See for the people who are willing to pay for Blackberries (or a Treo, PPC, Smartphone, etc.) out of their own pocket, the iPhone should be gobbling that market segment up, because it’s cooler, more stylish, easier to use and if you look at the graphic below from a recent Apple Inside article, a better deal than most of the Blackberries (and PPC/Smartphones). Sometimes by a significant margin.

So going back to my original question. If you could choose between a Blackberry or an iPhone, that does everything you need, but is easier to use, is a lot better looking, attracts more chicks (or guys), etc., at a cheaper price - what the heck are you doing with a Blackberry?

Of course, you could always sign up for the Sprint Sero plan, get 1250 minutes, unlimited data and unlimited text messaging with an HTC Touch - which is fantastic - for half the price of owning an iPhone. But no one talks about this, because everyone hates Sprint because their customer service reps treat you like you just walked into Guantanamo.

I’m just saying.

Because of volume, spam or whatever. Good luck dealing with it through Twitter, Facebook messaging or any of the new “web 2.0″ solutions.

They’re like the retarded little brothers of e-mail. Less controls, worse interface and poor or non-existent security and spam filters.

Email volume is a human behavior issue. It is technology agnostic. You can get a 100 emails a day or 10,000 twitters. You can have all the filters and rules you want to try to make things manageable. But no technology solution is going to fix the volume issue unless you consider nuking the world with an EMP to be an option. Doing something unpopular and ostracizing yourself from society would probably be the quickest way to solve this problem. Or going to jail. I hear email overload is not a problem there.

And is spam really a problem? I get tons of e-mails through various accounts and have never had an issue, except with Yahoo! Mail’s crap filter. Outlook’s filter isn’t great, but I’m only using that for corporate mail, and I believe there’s another layer of filtering that happens before it gets anywhere near my inbox. Gmail, especially, does a fantastic job filtering out spam, even with my junk address, it filters 99% of it correctly - which is impressive since 99% of the emails to that account are junk. Across the board, I have more issues with false positives than false negatives.

I’ve been waiting for Google to update JotSpot for a very long time. Finally, they released an updated. It was a completely and utter failure to innovate and improve.

It is indeed JAW - just another wiki. Or just another @$!%ing wiki if you want some extra emphasis.

Actually it’s really just JotSpot, the themed edition.

Besides the fact that there’s some loose Google app integration (and it is indeed loose, as it doesn’t automatically connect to your google docs list, Picasa account, etc., you have to copy and paste an embed URL - gee, thanks for nothing), it hasn’t changed a bit.

I can’t believe it took them 16 months to put out this piece of garbage. JotSpot could be on version 3, if they were never bought out by Google.

Clearly, Google cobbled Google Sites together in a weekend, when they realized they let it languish and suck over 16 months of inactivity. You may have forgotten, but JotSpot 1.0 was pretty hot for a wiki. Back in summer 2006.

However that hasn’t stopped some from dubbing it a “Sharepoint killer.” Ok, Google said it first, but that hasn’t stopped others from jumping on that bandwagon.

Google has been working on Google Apps for over a year (two years?). It’s still nowhere near Enterprise ready. In fact, they’re getting lapped by other online office developers like Zoho.

So after a year and a half of inactivity, a weekend’s worth of work suddenly makes JotSpot, Skinned Edition a Sharepoint killer (one of the more legitimately enterprise-level MS products - you’re not going to see any mom & pop’s running Sharepoint).

That is face-punchingly stupid.

Guy Kawasaki wrote that you should only ask women to provide feedback and help develop a business model, because it was useless to ask men about business models, because of a “killer” gene within their DNA. This gene made men want to kill people, animals and plants. But now, the only socially acceptable outlet for this killer gene was through “killing” another organization. For example, Zune the iPod killer, OS X the Windows killer, Google Docs the Office killer and now Google Sites the Sharepoint killer. Now he may have been slightly facetious, but as I’ve followed the industry (and the requisite stupidity as well), I’ve realized that the above statement was the most astute business insight I’ve ever come across. We may as well make it law.