Last night, before I went to bed, I set my Macbook Pro up to begin the installation of Mountain Lion. For those unfamiliar, this is Apple’s latest version of Mac OSX.
It’s been out for a while. I upgraded our family iMac months ago. But I held off on my work machine until now. Today, the migration to Mountain Lion is complete, and I frikkin’ love it.
What I love is the iCloud integration that comes built-in. For example, the “reminders” app is like a to do list. I create a list for business, and another for home, and they show up across all my Mac and iOS devices. If my wife (who helps me stay focused on business tasks) wants to assign something to me she can do it from our iMac and I’ll get it on my Macbook.
There are other things I love about Mountain Lion, but the cloud sync of what matters to me is incredible. Yet I can’t access it from my BlackBerry, for obvious reasons.
The more mobile computing evolves, the more we’re going to expect to access our important data seamlessly. And this is somewhere RIM may struggle. And it could, eventually, make me want to adopt a different mobile platform (if I can figure out touch typing! I’m typing this blog post on my BB Bold 9900).
I think RIM needs to get a desktop “dashboard” type of app out there FAST. It should work on Windows and Mac and it should let me see (and perhaps compose) my emails, BBMs, notes, docs, calendar, etc.
If I’m on a Windows 8 computer and I have a Microsoft Word doc, my BlackBerry dashboard app should automatically cloud synch the file to my BlackBerry account. I should be able to BBM people from my PC or Mac.
Technically, I guess RIM doesn’t need to have a desktop OS presence to make this kind of dashboard / cloud sync happen. It just needs an amazing app that installs on the two operating systems that matter most in the world.
My worry, for RIM, is they don’t see the importance of cloud sync’d data. They’re so busy catching up on the mobile ecosystem, this next major battleground could be where they’re falling behind and not even realizing it.
Hi, I'm Chris Umiastowski. I'm a 10-year veteran of sell side equity research and this is where I come to connect with friends on all things related to tech investing.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Chris,
completely agree with you. I too would love to see a cloud service from RIM. And i think we can expect it pretty soon with BB10. RIM’s acquisition of Newbay might bring this to BB10. i would love to sync between my BB10 handset and Playbook and like you said to PC.
so fingers crossed for the lauch.
They should not do it themselves. I do that with evernote everyday but there are others. Google contacts, calendar and email works amazing on my bb 9900,and evernote does the rest. I spent 2 years with an iphone and one with a nexus. Don’t do it. I realized I spend 80 % of my time o the stuff bb does well amd picked a phone that’s good at watching tv and movies and the other 20%.. Nope. Businees is up 25 % this year and I swear some of it is because I am faster, more efficient with my phone. I was not when I had the other two. One more thing, Rimm needs friends among the app makers, been competition Evernote and to the others does not help. Keep up the good work and good luck.
RIM has been listening. BBM Desktop rumored to launch alongside Blackberry 10:
http://nerdberry.net/2012/12/19/bbm-desktop-rumored-to-launch-alongside-blackberry-10/
If you look at stuff like Rogers One Number, which allows users to switch seamlessly between devices, it seems inevitable that RIM will have to develop with these things in mind. It’s what the end user expects and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle….