Features

Magneto launches, and Rim hits three million - but can civilization survive pocket email?

At last, Microsoft has decided to unveil Magneto; and (coincidence?) RIM announces that it has reached three million email users. Head for the hills! - the flood is upon you.

Magneto, for those who don't follow MS Mobile, is the new pocket PC operating system which runs on both PDA and smartphone, and (most importantly) enables push email to pocket devices.

Microsoft thinks this is easily the cleverest thing it has done, and is glowing with excitement over its imminent triumph over RIM. The only cloud it sees on the horizon is a possible legal obstruction from Visto.

Microsoft may be in for a dreadful shock:

The unveiling - tomorrow, Tuesday - is supposed to be a dreadful secret until 5 PM. In fact, all insiders know this is just a beta-test version. Nobody is actually expecting to see an official full-blown Magneto till September - and oddly the reason isn't technical, but legal. Technically, it's already pretty robust - and Vodafone (and probably other operators) have been handing out Magneto trial phones to prime customers.

"The really interesting thing isn't Magneto," commented Dean Bubbley of Disruptive Analysis. "What makes the market sit up is the prospect of a new version of Microsoft Exchange, which will enable proper email push to hand-helds." And that isn't expected till July; and the full, final version of Magneto is most unlikely to appear till September.

The  lawsuit that hangs over Magneto is not yet launched: it's the threat of action by Visto which has both Redmond and Microsoft's Scandinavian operation - which is a major force in mobile - running around like headless chickens.

But by the time that is resolved, Microsoft - and all mobile email rivals - may have bigger problems.

The first problem is that mobile email really isn't good for you, except in a few, specialist cases - niche markets. The second, is that mobile email is only something phone networks will tolerate if they make extra revenue from it - but the signs are, this is a shallow oil-field, soon to run dry. The third is that even if it does work, and we can manage it, it may still be impossible to expand the networks enough to cope with the traffic.

First, the personal risks. People who have email on mobile are mostly Blackberry users. These days, when I see someone with a Blackberry, I offer a  health warning. Nothing to do with "radiation" - I'm talking, quite seriously, about distracting yourself from your work, losing sleep, and finally, losing your job.

Recently,  the University of London Institute of Psychiatry produced a report showing that "the constant distractions of e-mail and texting are more harmful to performance than cannabis."

This can't be something you didn't know already: you can't concentrate on what you're doing if you're interrupted. But an incoming email is still, socially, something we respond to as if it were urgent. It probably isn't.

The Blackberry has introduced the world to pocket email. Three million RIM devices are now up and running - and the users just love it. But their colleagues, increasingly, are seeing ominous signs that this is not the way to increase productivity at work.

"I have a colleague who was promoted into the Blackberry level," said one IT director this week. "Within a month, she was literally obsessed with the distraction of constant email. She had to keep up. She was breaking off from everything she did, and reading incoming messages; she was getting two hours sleep a night, and eventually, when it was clear she was in danger of a serious breakdown, we took her Blackberry away from her."

The problem doesn't stop with disciplining the user; you have to find an email filter which means that the mobile user isn't distracted except for important matters. The trouble is: only the user is competent to judge what is important.

A month or so ago, I sat through an interview with a very senior guy - Niklas Zennstrom of Skype. He has email on his iMate PDA-phone; and while we were doing the interview, he was distracted by four emails. Last week, I saw a guy pick up his Blackberry messages during a coffee break at a convention; he got 80-odd emails. Only three of those were of the slightest interest to his work. Both these characters were being crippled by their email.

 Are there any workable email filters? None that I'd recommend.

But of course, the world wants email - we know this, because the mobile operators need more average revenue per user, and they have informed us (and their shareholders) that mobile email is The Way Of The Future, which will return them all to a golden age of high revenues.

Well, how realistic is that?

Think back to the early days of desktop email. In those days, Internet Service providers actually made money by offering to set people up with email accounts. I can remember being enormously flattered by one ISP which allowed me to have an email account for a year - for nothing. Twelve months later, they asked for over a hundred pounds for renewal, and I know for a fact that most people, faced with that ultimatum, meekly paid up.

A year after that, they tried the same stunt; and their entire user base evaporated. And why should we imagine that mobile email will, magically remain a premium-price service?

In any case, we know how mobile operators work. They reduce prices. The ten-pounds-per-week fee for mobile email today will slide steadily down to the five-pounds-per-month level, and then we'll start seeing "Six thousand free emails a month if you sign up with us!" special offers; within 18 months, it will be free for most users.

And then: the network.

There are ways of optimising GPRS data, and the networks can install them. That may - just possibly - mean that they can cope with the sort of data flood that push email will generate, without seeing the networks fall over.

Today, however, we're looking at a mail tsunami bearing down on a low coastline without any defences. July sees the new version of Exchange. Some proportion of Microsoft's user base is on a rolling upgrade contract - they've paid in advance for the latest versions, in exchange for a discount. This means that by the time the new Windows Mobile OS is released, somewhere between 30 and 50% of all Exchange installations will be able to push to Magneto. And then, the first phones will start shipping.

The result had better be that nobody buys Magneto phones. If people do, they will simply overwhelm the fragile GPRS data services - and the mobile operators will switch them off - and if you doubt me, think back to the ordinary phone exchange melt-downs we used to suffer from thirty years ago. When too many people all dialled in together, the Post Office simply switched the exchanges off.

The mail flood could even be launched ahead of that shockwave. Visto owns push email patents, and is looking for licensees. If it does a deal with the major operators, they can have their own service, without Exchange. Will they want that? Ha! - is a bear a Catholic?

How can corporate civilization manage the email threat? It's not trivial. RIM has made the bait in the trap very, very attractive. RIM today announced that "more than three million subscribers are now using the BlackBerry wireless platform, with one million subscribers added in less than six months."

The curve is steeply up: "BlackBerry took five years to reach the first one million milestone, a further ten months to double that. This latest milestone demonstrates the continuing popularity of the BlackBerry platform," says the announcement.

"It's an exciting time as BlackBerry continues to enjoy enormous success and rapid growth around the world," said Jim Balsillie, Chairman and Co-CEO, Research In Motion.  "With over 50,000 retail points of presence, accelerated geographic expansion and the anticipated addition of 100 new carriers in 2005, we are scaling our operations for the five million and 10 million subscriber milestones."

Join the Brave New World if you like. I'm going to remain aloof.