Microsoft moves in on mobile e-mail
By Kevin J. O'Brien International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8, 2005
BERLIN In April, Martin Bailey, managing director of First Berlin, a
German equity research firm, bought a BlackBerry 7100V from his mobile carrier,
Vodafone, for about ?100.
When Bailey travels to see clients in Frankfurt, or to companies like
Jenoptik in Jena, near Weimar, he uses the device to get live stock prices or
communicate with colleagues in Berlin by e-mail. "This thing really frees me
from the office," Bailey said.
Mobile e-mail is spreading to a wider audience, analysts and software
makers say, as the number of competing services increases and smaller companies
begin to use "push" e-mail to extend corporate e-mail systems to mobile
devices. In the wireless e-mail world, "push" means that messages are sent
straight to mobile devices in real time, without the user having to log on
periodically and "pull" them from a server.
Research in Motion, the Waterloo, Ontario, maker of the Blackberry, has
had the push e-mail market largely to itself since it sold the first BlackBerry
device in 1999. This year, three million of the 3.5 million regular mobile
e-mail users around the world are using BlackBerry devices, according to Ovum,
a research company in London.
But on Monday, Microsoft made a move that could make the business a lot
more competitive, announcing that it would give thousands of its existing
corporate customers free push e-mail software by upgrading their Microsoft
Exchange 2003 server software.
Microsoft's move aims to spur the sale of smart phones, personal digital
assistants and other hand-held devices that use its latest Windows Mobile 5.0
software. As many as 120 million users around the world could benefit from the
software upgrade for Microsoft Exchange if they were to buy handsets that used
the latest version of Windows Mobile software.
So far, Microsoft has been unable to translate its global lead in desktop
operating systems to hand-held devices. This year, Microsoft's software will be
on only 17 percent of the 18.8 million Internet-capable smart phones sold
around the world, according to Ovum. The vast majority, 78 percent, will use
software developed by Symbian, the British-based maker of mobile operating
systems whose biggest shareholder is Nokia, with co-owners Ericsson, Samsung,
Sony-Ericsson, Siemens and Panasonic.
"We think mobile e-mail is one of the most significant trends you're
going to see over the next five years," Scott Horn, senior marketing director
for Microsoft's mobile and embedded devices group, said in an interview. "This
declares we're in the market in a big way, and we're here to stay."
Research in Motion, which has dominated the mobile e-mail business by
working with mobile phone operators to sell complete hardware, software and
service packages to large companies, said it was not worried by Microsoft's
announcement, which was made by Steve Ballmer, the chief executive, at a
conference in Orlando, Florida.
"Look, the BlackBerry system is and will remain the gold standard in this
business," Mike Lazaridis, co-founder, president and co-chief executive of RIM,
said in an interview. "You have to remember that the BlackBerry does much, much
more than just push e-mail, which is all that Microsoft is offering."
Microsoft's decision to take on RIM was just a matter of time, some
competitors said, as mobile e-mail was poised to move from niche to necessity
for roving corporate workers.
"This is a business that's really just starting to take off now and move
into the corporate mainstream," said Brian Bogosian, president and chief
executive of Visto, a Redwood City, California, maker of push e-mail software
for Vodafone's networks.
"It took a while for this business to take off, but we are finally in the
last 12 months starting to see real growth," said Nigel Clarke, director of
Northern European sales at Intellisync, based in San Jose, California, which
makes push e-mail for companies like America Online, IBM, Oracle and Pfizer.
"Corporate IT managers are now willing to pay for push e-mail."
Unlimited storage from AOL
Time Warner's America Online said it planned to provide users of its AOL
online service with unlimited e-mail storage, Bloomberg News reported.
America Online's 28 million AOL subscribers will no longer have any limit
on the number of e-mail messages, attachments and folders they can save on the
company's servers. America Online said AOL was the first online service to
offer unlimited storage.
The company also said Monday that it would allow customers who use
telephone lines to log on through more than one so-called screen name at a
time.
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