A massive BlackBerry outage has left users with limited email and messaging services for much of this week.

The BlackBerry outage began Monday for users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and it spread to North America on Wednesday. Research in Motion (RIM) has blamed the BlackBerry outage on the failure of one of its core networking switches — and the subsequent failure of its backup system.

The BlackBerry outage comes at a terrible time for RIM. Once the only game in town for mobile email, its market share is eroding as consumer devices running Apple iOS and Google Android take hold. RIM still offers the strongest enterprise management capabilities, but that matters less and less, thanks to the consumerization of IT. And its enterprise reputation will definitely take a hit with this extended BlackBerry outage.

Late Wednesday night, RIM said service levels were improving. And today, co-CEO Mike Lazaridis posted this message on YouTube:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/zQ1esvGae_s" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Apple iOS 5 released

The latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 5, hit iTunes on Thursday. The release brings more than 200 new features to the iPhone and iPad, including a drop-down notifications menu, better camera options and Twitter integration that’s laid on real thick.

With iOS 5, Apple is also moving beyond mobile devices into another consumerization area: cloud storage. The new iCloud service stores music, videos, photos and documents and makes them available across your iOS devices, Macs and even PCs. Hey, speaking of cloud storage…

Box.net targets businesses

Cloud storage and collaboration service Box.net has raised $81 million in its latest round of funding, designed to help boost its enterprise offerings.

Box.net and similar services, such as Dropbox, have grown in popularity among people who want to store and access their data and documents — both personal and business — from any device. But this Wild West approach has businesses concerned about security, and now the major IT vendors are swooping in.

Microsoft (Windows Live SkyDrive), Apple (iCloud) and VMware (Project Octopus) are all entering the cloud storage market to address enterprise needs. Box.net, for one, is not backing down.

“Businesses of all sizes are moving their information and collaboration to the cloud, and with this new capital we’ll support their transition by continuing to aggressively out-innovate legacy players like Microsoft,” co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie said in a press release.

Box.net also turned down a $600 million acquisition offer from Citrix Systems earlier this year, according to Forbes. And to combat this week’s debut of iCloud, the company is giving away 50 GB of storage to all iOS users.

NEW YORK — There’s room for a third vendor to succeed alongside Apple and Google in the mobile OS market. Who that vendor will be — Microsoft or RIM — is up for debate.

Analysts discussed the future of the market during an Interop session this morning. Research in Motion (RIM) has dominated in the business world with its BlackBerry smartphones, but its long-term outlook isn’t so rosy, thanks to employees buying iPhones, iPads and Android devices and using them for work.

Even if RIM as a company doesn’t survive this shift, the BlackBerry will still maintain a strong enterprise presence, said Rohit Mehra, director of enterprise communications infrastructure for IDC.

“BlackBerry’s going to be around, in terms of the install base, for a long time,” he said. “Things don’t change that fast in our industry.”

But Mark Lowenstein, managing director of Mobile Ecosystem, said Microsoft is in a better position, thanks to Windows’ huge install base among business users.

“It’s going to be very interesting to see what Microsoft does in this space over the next year,” he said. “They already have multiple hooks in the enterprise.”

Andrew Borg, senior research analyst with the Aberdeen Group, called Microsoft a “force to be reckoned with” because of its Windows Phone OS. The latest version, Mango, features a unique design that will set Microsoft smartphones apart, Borg said.

“They are not imitating iOS,” he said. “There are many that think that Android is a clone of iOS. You can’t argue that with Microsoft.”

Hewlett-Packard has told CEO Leo Apotheker to hit the bricks after less than year on the job. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman will replace him.

Apotheker was under fire for the failure of HP’s TouchPad tablets, his idea to spin off the company’s successful PC line and the $10.3 billion acquisition of software vendor Autonomy. Thanks to those moves and repeated cuts to HP’s sales forecasts, the company’s stock has dropped nearly in half since Apotheker became CEO in November.

The news came a day after The New York Times reported that most HP board members had never met Apotheker before voting to hire him. But they’ve all met Whitman; she’s been on the board since January.

Windows Phone 7 Mango update due soon

Windows Phone 7.5, code-named Mango, will be out “in the next week or two,” Microsoft said Wednesday. The Mango update process will also deliver specialized firmware for each Windows Phone 7 device, developed to make sure all phone features and apps work with the new OS.

The Windows Phone 7 Mango update will bring multitasking capabilities, support for 4G networks, threaded email and advanced messaging and social networking features.

McAfee focuses on mobile

McAfee laid out its security strategy for mobile devices this week. The company’s approach focuses on securing devices themselves, along with the apps they run and the data they store. Antivirus, application scanning and even systems management technologies are part of McAfee’s strategy, highlighted by its Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) product. EMM is designed to give admins the same level of control over mobile devices that they have over corporate PCs and laptops.

Layoffs hit PlayBook manufacturer

Quanta Computer, manufacturer of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry PlayBook, is laying off 1,000 workers because of the tablet’s poor sales. DigiTimes reported that Quanta’s Taiwan-based PlayBook production line started with more than 2,000 employees, so these layoffs mean a 50% staff reduction.

Given the enterprise dominance of BlackBerry smart phones, hopes were high that the PlayBook could have similar success in the tablet market. But the phones’ major selling point, corporate email access, didn’t carry over, because for some reason the PlayBook doesn’t have a native email client.

RIM shipped only 500,000 PlayBooks in the second quarter of this year, and that number dropped to 200,000 last quarter. RIM’s profits plunged 59% last quarter as well, and Wednesday its stock price reached at a five-year low.

Photo (cc) by joyosity on Flickr and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Research in Motion reported dismal financial results (PDF) yesterday, with profits down 59% and sales down 10% from the same quarter last year.

The company said customer demand for its older-model smartphones was lower than expected, but shipments are expected to increase by 27% to 37% this quarter, thanks to the new BlackBerry 7 line.

Presumably, the reason a lot of customers didn’t buy older-model devices was because they knew the BlackBerry 7 was coming out. This same phenomenon might bite the BlackBerry 7 in the butt, too. RIM is planning a new line of devices with a QNX-based operating system for 2012, and customers might not want to buy the BlackBerry 7 if they think it’ll be obsolete in a year.

Plus, as critics of Microsoft’s Windows 8 launch pointed out this week, by the time these new OSes come out, who knows what kind of improvements Apple, Google and other innovative, agile companies will have made?

“Yeah, well, Apple and Google don’t matter in terms of enterprise adoption,” BlackBerry loyalists say.

That’s a fair point. But Microsoft does matter, and it’s blurring the line between PCs and mobile devices with Windows 8 — to the point that, theoretically, you could manage Windows 8 mobile devices just as you’d manage PCs. That’s a direct threat to RIM, whose major selling point is the BlackBerry’s enterprise support and management.

With the rapid innovations of Apple and Google, and Microsoft’s focus on enterprise integration and management, RIM is at risk of getting crowded out of the market.

Photo (cc) by Digitpedia.com and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

The Samsung Windows Developer Preview PC, the first Windows 8 computer, went home with attendees of this week’s Microsoft BUILD conference in Anaheim.

Note that Microsoft calls it a PC, even though it’s really a tablet. That’s an intentional move, because Microsoft’s approach with Windows 8 is that tablets and PCs are one and the same: same interface, same apps, same touch-screen capabilities. With Windows 8, the thinking goes, the only difference between a PC and a tablet is that one’s hooked up to a keyboard and mouse.

If you’re an IT admin who’s weary about having to manage and secure tablets separately from your  Windows desktops, this is the kind of strategy you just might like.

Of course, this is Microsoft we’re talking about, so we’ll have to wait and see if everything is as seamless as they say it is. And we’ll probably have to wait a very long time; the Windows 8 build on the Samsung Windows Developer Preview PC is a pre-beta version, and Microsoft hasn’t even set a timetable for general availability yet.

While you wait, check out the hardware specs for the Samsung Windows Developer Preview PC:

• Second-generation Intel Core i5 processor
• Samsung Super PLS display (1366 by 768 resolution)
• 11.6″ diagonal touch screen
• UEFI BIOS
• Memory: 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM
• Storage: 64 GB SSD
• USB, Micro SD and HDMI ports
• Dock with USB, HDMI and Ethernet ports