Mobile devices Toolkit

The Good fight over mobile email

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Mobile Email,
BlackBerry

Michael Singer CNET News

Published: 21 Jul 2005 12:25 BST

Patent-holding company NTP says you license their technology. I'm curious if you had any thoughts on how the patent dispute and contract negotiation between RIM and NTP is going to shake out.
I can't speculate. We took a licence because we think it's better to spend our time and energy innovating on behalf of our customers rather than litigating at the end.

Have you gotten a lot more calls since this debate heated up between those two companies?
You know, I don't think customers pay much attention to it.

You mean your sales force hasn't capitalised on this kind of argument?
Actually, I don't think you see us ever talk about our marketing materials or sales. You

know, we just... focus on the product, customer... Customers don't want to be engaged in that role. They want to be engaged on how you're going to solve their problem.

Last year, you sat down with ZDNet's Dan Farber to discuss your momentum in the industry. What's changed since then?
Well, our customer base... must have tripled... I mean, we had just massive customer adoption. There's been obviously the huge success of standard devices in that period. We're seeing the (Palm) Treos sell like crazy. We're seeing Microsoft obviously announce, you know, Windows Mobile 2005, which is terrific for Good. We've announced our relationship with Nokia, and we're working very closely with them. We've announced a partnership with Symbol. We've done GoodAccess (which delivers applications besides messaging to handhelds). We've announced carrier relationships.

Talk more about your partnerships. Who do you see yourself aligning with more often than not?
What we do is we let customers get any combination of those really that they want. If they want to get a Palm Treo, and they want to deploy Microsoft Office out on it, and they want to do it over, you know, their favourite carrier, we let them do that. And so, as a result, we end up with partnerships on the operating systems' side with Microsoft, with Symbian, Nokia, with Palm. On the application side, we've announced relationships with Oracle, Siebel, Salesforce.com and others. And then on the handheld manufacturing side, we have relationships with Dell, HP, Palm, Nokia, Symbian, Samsung, Motorola and Audiovox for that matter.

How important is R&D to you? Do you just let Microsoft, Symbian and Palm call the shots?
No, we have a very large R&D engineering organisation, but what they do is they write software on top of the platform providers. When I ran developer relations at Netscape, I learned a lot from that experience. The most important lesson I learned is, don't try to compete with the major platforms as a platform provider; add value on top of them. And so, what we do is we add value on top of the regular operating systems.

And those operating systems include Symbian, Windows and Palm?
Right.

What about Linux?
Linux is sort of the dark horse that, you know, may emerge as an important player... as people want to build more applications around it.

We run on the handhelds that sell. So if somebody makes a Linux handheld that starts selling a lot, we'll develop for it. Right now, it appears that customers want to buy Treos. They want to buy Windows Mobile. And they want to buy Nokia devices. So that's the stuff we're writing for.

So does Good Technology have a Linux strategy just in case something were to pop up?
I'm really not being flip. We are always watching the market to see what sells. If people start writing DR-DOS on handhelds, that's what we're going to write for. I mean we're an application company, so we go where the installed base is.