or MDM for the abbreviation. If you have read my blog for a while, you know I was a Blackberry fan, Blackberry was also my first Smartphone. The company (used to be Research In Motion) and the Blackberry has been in declining in recent years, and yesterday it announced buying the Good Technology (a rival mobile email technology provider). I have not used Good Technology based email myself, but have heard it being used in a few places I worked. Guess I was not important enough to carry a smartphone in those occasions 🙂
Back to topic, Good Technology operates in a large space called Mobile Device Management, with a few competitors, MobileIron and AirWatch comes to mind for startups, then we have traditional players such as IBM and Citrix. I got to know MobileIron a few years ago as I was working on iOS dev and deployment and at the time, they have not IPOed yet. I looked at its stock price just now, and not surprisingly it did not do well. Just like Alex said in this Techcrunch article, it suggested this space is not gold mine. I knew AirWatch (which is bigger than MobileIron), was bought by VMWare in early 2014. If a company can go IPO, they would go IPO instead of being bought out. Of course this does not apply to Instagram and Whatsapp, as Facebook paid handsome money for them at the time. For Blackberry, it seems like a shrewd move as all these players are down at this moment, personally I felt MDM is a niche space that big player not necessarily want to crush startup, like Box or Dropbox situation (in that case, Google, Amazon, Microsoft Azure/OneDrive, and to less extent, Apple iCloud all compete). For BBRY, it seems like they just got some maintenance revenue to sustain for a while, while they try to turn around.