Has Steve Ballmer got a taste for BlackBerries?

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 02 September 2007 14:55

Opinion and Analysis

Another dimension to this picture is the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)   a rather hard to grasp concept that still has limited awareness outside the telco industry. It is a systems architecture that will be standardised across fixed and mobile network standards technologies and will be key to the delivery of high level applications seamlessly across multiple networks. And those 'three screens'.

We take it for granted that you can make a phone call between fixed and mobile numbers anywhere in the world and that you can send SMS between mobiles on any network in the world. The vision of IMS is to extend this  universality to high level features such as presence.

As one IMS expert, Anders Norrga, senior marketing manager at Ericsson, put it you will be able to enter a new contact via your TV, have it immediately available on you cellphone and also be able to see the 'presence' of that contact (ie their contactability) regardless of what networks and communication technologies they use.

Microsoft is very much focussed on unified communications so will not be sitting idly by ignoring the possibility that these development could bypass it.

RIM's BlackBerry was the first to deliver push email to a handheld device. That lead has long gone, and its market position is increasingly under threat form cellphone vendors who have bought competitors to its technology: Nokia bought Intellisync and Motorola bought Good Technology. A year ago IDC identified this as a key issue for RIM .

In response RIM has extended its scope from specialised devices for business users to a range of new devices with multimedia features such as music players and cameras aimed at consumers. It has to date done a good job with these but faces an enormous challenge keeping up with the pace of handset innovation driven by the likes of Nokia.

The Microsoft takeover may be nothing more than rumour but in the fast changing mobile market and with the increasing importance of integration of mobile devices with fixed line services, and with massive players like Google, Apple and Microsoft seemly all converging on the same markets the absorption of a niche player like RIM into a bigger player seems almost inevitable.