Talking Preemptively About The BlackBerry Workaround

The times they are a-changin’.

This post seems to be older than 17 years—a long time on the internet. It might be outdated.

I love talking with Matt Matteson. Why? For the most part, we have the same interests and to that extent, we read the same news feeds. It can be frustrating at times, I’ll starting talking about something and he’ll finish my sentence, robbing me of the glory of announcing something geeky, but whatever frustration I have is immediately replaced with an in depth conversation about the topic at hand. Case in point: The BlackBerry Workaround.

A little over two weeks ago (exactly a week before my birthday, in fact), we headed over to Qdoba to grab a bite to eat and talk shop. We ended up spending a fair amount of time discusing the BlackBerry patient issue, which I won’t go in to. Specifically, we were talking about what was going to happen to RIM if courts told them to stop using NTP’s technology. Matt suggested a firmware update and it was decided that an over-the-air upgrade could probably take place. However, I argued that it would be cost prohibitive and RIM would never do it (at least willingly). Well, I may be eating my words, to some extent. Slashdot has an article discussing the BlackBerry workaround and it’s pretty similar to what Matt and I discused at Qdoba. I still think it would be cheaper for RIM to settle with NTP. The cost of redeploying an entire software package would be a very expensive endeavor, between hiring technicians to install the operations side software, the tech support to help consumers install the user software, and all the lost revenue from customers leaving BlackBerry and going to Verzion’s Treo (or something similar).

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

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