Defending RIM Blackberry Against Productivity

Jasksk writes "Is Blackberry causing masses to lose productivity? This article on CoolTechZone.com clears the myth. The author writes, 'Ever since the patent litigation has settled between NTP and RIM, Blackberry has recaptured the headlines, but this time, it's because of the device itself. While numerous users, generally corporate executives, adore the device, the environment surrounding Blackberry isn't too positive. A number of recent reports and columns are portraying Blackberry (and similar solutions) as time wasting, productivity lowering behemoths that don't deserve to exist.'"

I find them to be distracting...

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

A few people in our organization have them and I find them (the devices) to be somewhat distracting. During meetings, I see coworkers constantly, not so covertly, glancing down to IM someone, read their mail, or mostly check stock quotes. However, I suppose this is mostly a cultural issue. Here in North America, that would be considered rude. When I'm in China, I notice that people don't think twice about stopping mid-sentence to take a call or read an incoming IM. When I asked a few people about the practice, they seemed genuinely puzzled by the question and said that it wasn't considered rude or out of the ordinary at all. So I guess the answer is "it depends on where you are." :-)

as a Blackberry admin...

[CheechBG]

I can tell you that these things are a pain in the ass. Not so much from a technology standpoint, but mainly from the users. I get calls all the time: "My blackberry didn't receive this email in 2.3 seconds, the system is down, FIX THIS NOW!!!"

There is a certain threshold that exists between productive and slave. Slavery, indentured or not, exists when you are inextricably bound to your employer, and have to respond immediately to his commands, on demand, 24/7. At least in my office, with most of the BB users, that line has been crossed.

From a technology standpoint, Blackberry Enterprise Server isn't really THAT bad, I just wish there would be more QA from RIM's developers. Hotfixes and service packs come out far too often, but at least they are trying.

Blackberry is part of the problem

[murdocj]

At my last job, people in our parent office were addicted to various forms of "multitasking" including reading their email during meetings, answering the blackberries, etc. The only problem was that they weren't multitasking, they were unitasking and not paying attention to the current situation, which meant that the meeting was useless. They seemed to be incapable for focusing on a single topic for more than a couple of minutes.

The funniest thing was when the uber-development boss, who was the worst offender, both in showing up late to meetings and not paying attention, decided that his particular meeting was critical and that laptops, blackberries, etc would be forbidden. Of course, then he pulled out his blackberry at the first meeting.

Re:Well

[arivanov]

While what you say is true in principle the reality does not get even close.

In order to prioritise on BB you need to have perfect or nearly perfect mail delivery filters that are guaranteed to be applied prior to the mail being picked up by BES. Not a single one of the corporate email systems officially supported by BES is even close to fitting this description. Exchange has always been a piece of sh** as far as filtering is concerned (regexps in an exchange filter on a custom field anyone?), Lotus is not much better and Group(un)wise is not far off from either one of these.

So in reality you get all of your emails, get distracted, interrupted, your concentration broken and after that you can prioritise.

Err.. No... Thanks... I like to be disturbed only when there is a real emergency. This is best done with an email-to-SMS interface.

First - it is 20+ times cheaper to run per user.

Second - it can be made to rely on a single box to run - the mail server. For comparison, BB in order to operate requires your email infrastructure to run properly, your firewall infrastructure to run properly, the Internet connectivity to run properly, BES to run properly, RIM itself to run properly and the GSM operator internet connectivity to run properly. That is a fat and long bill of materials for an emergency warning system. Definitely too long to my liking.

By the way, out of all obvious targets RIM is the only one yet to be hit with a good oldfashioned DDOS. It will be entertaining to watch the congresscritters jump up and down when it finally happens (provided that you are not the person responsible for running BES in your company).

Re:Blackberry is part of the problem

[darkmeridian]

Blackberries aren't the problem as much as it is the people who abuse them. Remember, Blackberries don't annoy people; inconsiderate people annoy people. Case in point. Once I had a job interview at a law firm. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I'm one of the more well-qualified candididates on the IP law market. (Top five, uh, top four, law school, Slashdot poster, yadda yadda.) Interviewer is a bigwig, head of IP litigation, etc. Anyway, we shake hands and then he almost immediately excuses himself and starts hacking away on his Blackberry. I sit there for about five minutes. I finish my drink, then I get up, thank him for his time, and leave. Query: Would he have pulled the same thing with a cell phone if he didn't have a Blackberry? All signs point to yes.

You think it's rude to talk to people in public?

[twitter]

They should be totally banned in situations like meetings, or at a grocery.

You are kidding me, right? You don't want me to call my wife while I'm grocery shopping. This is different from me chatting with her in the grocery store? Perhaps you think talking in public is rude and that we should all silently keep to ourselves, heads down, like convicts.

Article is silly...

[RichardtheSmith]

The article is silly and lacks any depth of understanding of the real
issues.

In the 80's you had to be near a landline phone and only a small
handful of people in academics and the research community used email.

In the 90's if you worked in IT and spent a non-trivial amount of time
on the road or on-call, you had to carry a pocket pager *and* a cell
phone. It wasn't until the late 90's that email became ubiquitous,
and even then it was still limited to 9-5 in the office environment.

In the "00" decade, many different initiatives came along to merge all
that stuff into one thing, so that it's no longer about the device or
the communications medium, it's about just being in communication
period. The Blackberry is simply the most successful example of that.

The real "killer app" aspect of the BB is that you can take all your
possible methods of being interrupted, route them through a single
device, and then turn that device off when you no longer wish to be
interrupted. It gives you the power. What you do with that power is
entirely your choice.

The other killer app is the ability to merge your email and cell phone
address lists and have them update instantly and on-the-fly thru the
wireless network. This is just the fulfillment of "computer-telephony
integration" that we have been promised for the past 20 years. BB was
the first one to make it into a real product that people could benefit
from.

Saying that a new technology invites rude or disruptive behavior is
nothing new. There were many people who thought electric lighting was
evil because decent people should not be working after the sun went
down. That problem won't be going away, unfortunately.

Lack of RFC compliancy

[crath]

I continue to avoid Blackberry and Good devices because they do not properly deal with multipart MIME email. The email RFCs provide for email clients with varying levels of capability, but current mobile email devices (especially the Blackberry) ignore the RFCs and dumb down everything to plain text.

I completely get it that the vendors of these devices are trying to keep bandwidth usage to a minimum, and so only allow their client devices to push plain text bits over the wire; however, that is not a good reason to strip everything back to plain text. In my work environment, we mark up email text and rely upon the receiver using an email client that hasn't been completely neutered.

When Blackberries were first introduced, our wireless networks did not have the capacity to push a large volume of rich text email; however, with 3G networks now actively being rolled out there is no longer any business rationale for imposing this limitation.

On a related note: this is yet another example Microsoft continuing to demonstrate their incompetence. In their pursuit of Blackberry's market share, they should have brought full-featured portable email to market. Instead they only just managed---in Mobile Office 5---to produce a client that marginally outperforms the Blackberry client. Bill Gates needs to stop hiring co-op students and hire real developers who can produce full featuerd software.