Patent Poker, Old Calculators Never Die

By Ernest Lilley

February 2, 2006

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Watching RIM trade courtroom blows with NTP over the patent affair is more entertaining than watching high stakes celebrity poker, especially since mobile e-mail company Visto issued its own suit against fellow NTP licensee Good Technologies this past week. In the meantime, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has sided with RIM by issuing a non-final rejection of yet another NTP patent, thereby rejecting all five patents that are at issue in a RIM v. NTP patent-infringement case that's currently before a federal judge.

It's also about as likely to actually affect any of us directly. If RIM shuts down its network, NTP loses access to its revenue stream, which is the last thing in the world the company want. The thing to bear in mind is that these are all businesses, and since NTP only makes money if licensees make money, it needs RIM viable in the fold.

In December Gartner advised clients to hold off on mission critical Blackberry deployments, making stockholders nervous, but recently it has recanted, lowering the risk of a shutdown to only 10 percent. It pays for analysts to err on the side of caution--and I'm not suggesting that caution is a bad thing--but what you really need to ask yourself is just how bad a RIM shutdown would actually be? It's not like alternatives and workarounds don't exist, even discounting the "secret solution" that RIM claims is has in its back pocket.

Good and Visto stand to gain, and they claim to be doing so already, but in fact their services have never had a lot of market appeal. If RIM did shut down, I suspect you'd find a plethora of options suddenly available through your phone carrier. What's really interesting about this whole debacle is how much free publicity its garnered for mobile email on the whole and RIM in specific. I can hardly wait for it all to be over so I can read the book.

On the other hand, Blackberrys aren't necessarily the best tool for the job, depending on what the job is, and that's what you should be using to determine whether to set sail, jump ship or wave from the pier until the end of February, when U.S

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