The Blackphone people are fighting with the BlackBerry people and it's not about which phone is more black.
On one side, we have BlackBerry Enterprise Mobility Strategist Joe McGarvey who has taken the Blackphone to task for, as he puts it, offering "Consumer-Grade Privacy That's Inadequate for Business," as his blog post is titled.
In the other corner we have Blackphone CEO Toby Weir-Jones, who responded to McGarvey's treatise with his own fusillade against BlackBerry, a pointed response that relegates BlackBerry to the where-are-they-now file.
"Nowadays, the only thing sustaining them (BlackBerry) is the inertia of their remaining enterprise and government customers, but that too will eventually come to rest while we and others continue to win over those accounts," wrote Weir-Jones. Ouch.
Well, BlackBerry started this skirmish, perhaps out of frustration over the arrival on the market of another competitor that seems to have taken aim at BlackBerry's strengths and customer base. BlackBerry Ltd. (no longer Research in Motion) has seen much better days and they are scrambling not only to grow but to keep what little they have left. The company recently made an appearance on a list of 10 companies that are likely to disappear in 2015.
Blackphone is the brainchild of SGP Technologies, a joint venture between Geeksphone and Silent Circle - the latter being a company dedicated to providing security and privacy solutions for voice, video, text and files. Geeksphone supply the hardware expertise. The only product on the market right now is the basic Blackphone, an iPhone-sized smartphone that operates on PrivatOS, a customized version of Android OS.
Together with Silent Circle software contributions, the Blackphone is marketed primarily as the smartphone that will keep the NSAs of the world from knowing your business. Blackphone encrypts everything - voice, mail, text, etc. - and claims to be spy-proof.
BlackBerry had, or has the undying support of corporate IT departments for its own privacy and security strengths. The company's attempts at serving the music-listening, game-playing, social media-crazed consumer market have been underwhelming and as such their loss of market share can be attributed to its failure to translate their enterprise success to the consumer market.
Fearing Blackphone's intrusion on their corporate turf, it's no surprise that BlackBerry's attack on Blackphone would attempt to pigeonhole the Blackphone into the "consumer product only" category. This is a crucial moment in BlackBerry's future; they are trying to innovate in both business and consumer markets; in fact, as Weir-Jones' blog post helpfully points out, BlackBerry's stock price has fallen from $230 in July 2007 to $11.51 in July 2014.
