Gartner tells IT shops that it's 'game over' for BlackBerry

I view them like the ratings agencies. They exist because someone has to fill a void. For the ratings agencies, there is a void where people who don't have a lot of financial knowledge are placed on top of large sums of money. One could argue they shouldn't, but they're there, so they need someone to give them guidance on investments. Gartner exists similarly because there is a void in organizations and their knowledge of technology. In the absence of Gartner, the un-tech-savvy CIOs just buy from whoever they play golf with. We could argue that all CIOs should be hands on current in all the relevant technology, but that's not the world we live in.

An interesting question would be, "What's the return on investment in getting into the right quadrant?" It truly is a marketing decision that should be compared alongside advertising, conference attendance and direct mail.

It's all about managers in BigCos. Barely literate as they are, they hardly read anything at all; Gartner reports (well, their summaries anyway) are among the few things they do consider. If you are in the right quadrant, you can say so while playing golf and get the manager to sign a big check for your s*it. He'll never actually use it himself anyway, it will just be forced on his underlings.

I was recently involved in a proof of concept for a rolebased access control tool for an enterprise, and we read the Gartner reports on the topic, where they evaluate the products in the space.

The tool we were primarily looking at, we could hardly recognize from Gartner's description - it was filled with factual errors.

Make you wonder what the quality of other Garner reports are...

Edit: Typo

To answer your question - Yes, they do.

I call this "shifting the burden of responsibility"[1] and it basically boils down to this - imagine you're an IT manager and your boss says "Should we support Blackberry anymore?" Who is the authority to say whether the answer is Yes or No to this question? If you (the IT manager) think you are...What happens when you're wrong? Hence why you simply shift this over to someone or some organization who has established themselves as the authority.

This is why the analyst industry exists.

[1] - http://www.techdisruptive.com/2013/07/18/shifting-the-burden...

It is paid significant attention to in the Big Freaking Enterprise. And by those who would sell to the BFE.

Gartner quadrants are like the App Store for enterprise software. When you're tasked with choosing say an app for handling Supply Chain Management often you're first step is looking at the Gartner report for that space because it gives you a good market overview of who the major players are in that space and how they relate.

Hence Gartner coverage can be a great channel for acquiring b2b enterprise customers. It also helps establish credibility.

Someones not going to buy a product just because a Gartner paper, but it provides a starting point for evaluating vendors.

Similarly no company is going to look at this and stop using Blackberry tomorrow, but it puts evaluating BB usage/potential migration onto their radar.

Gartner reports are the basis for big corp software evaluations(Wal-Mart's and the banks). If you have to sell software to fortune 500 clients, getting into the gartner quadrant is a must to be considered for evaluation. Gartner publishes magic quadrants for B2B markets(even niche ones).

At least with Apple, I'm pretty sure that if you're an enterprise customer you can run the entire provisioning / update service in-house, including specifying which apps are allowed and how/when they should be updated. I know at least a few big enterprises with high security risk (banks, oil companies) that have allowed iPhones on their networks.

With iOS 7 supporting per-app VPN, you can couple that with corporate provisioning to require particular apps for company email, messaging, file markup, and require those apps to only work over the company VPN.

What's more, given that Microsoft is known to have shipped backdoored code, and known to have been the fastest to cooperate with NSA etc., it's not clear where your last sentence comes from, that someone would trust MSFT code before Apple and Google code.

That said, yes, Windows phone absolutely should have had an enterprise push to appeal to the IT crowd depending on Active Directory, Exchange, Sharepoint, etc. They should have sidestepped the iOS vs Android battle and defined a "blue ocean" strategy with two prongs: (1) corporate/enterprise (targeting IT departments and white collar wage earners), (2) feature/smart phones (targeting kids in those households).

While iOS and Android (as seen in Apple, Samsung, and Droid adverts) are competing to be fiercely individualist choices, MSFT should have gone after groups/communities/companies/families. Groupware is a recognized Microsoft strength.

Maybe... What is their sales trend though? I haven't bothered to look into myself, but based on what we see and hear, my assumption would be that BB sales are going down.

There are still lots of legacy BB shops, and those shops are still hiring new employees, replacing lost or outdated phones and so forth. BB may be selling 6 million units per quarter, but if they are losing marketshare rapidly (as they appear to be), those sales most likely aren't worth much. Additionally, if they are staffed up for 20 million units a month (eg: tons of office space, lots of personnel), then 6 million is not enough to sustain the company. We've already seen signs of this in the form of massive layoffs.

Also, this isn't a market where you can stagnate, so they won't be around indefinitely unless they have the R&D team to keep pace with new trends, plus create a couple of innovations.

Not really, when the 6 million devices are almost all part of the dying feature phone* niche. It only goes down from here.

* I consider the iPhone to be the first "smartphone" by a reasonably modern definition of the word.

> It's amazing that BlackBerry can sell almost 6 million phones a quarter and be considered a failure.

But they can't.

Blackberry sold 6.8 million phones in Q1 of fiscal 2013. But only 3.7 million phones in Q2. This is not a good trend -- even for a Q2.

Q3 runs from September 1 to November 30. We'll find out at the end of December how they're doing in the current quarter.

Android and Apple already do compete for this space. They both provide provisioning, encrypted storage, VPN, exchange support and remote wipe, and that's pretty much what 90% of the enterprise needs.

Z10, too. BB10 devices are beautiful, they're just duct-taped to a dead-end OS and came too late to save the company. Also, going with non-discoverable gesture-based navigation was a doomed idea. I get what they're going for, but when you're scrambling to keep your users you don't want to create that kind of huge barrier for them.

If only. Even if BBOS was forked from an old version of android (like, 2.3 or something) you'd still have some baseline of compatibility, a place to build an ecosystem.