At this week's Computerworld Premier 100 conference in Tucson, I asked many of the IT leaders whether their companies will use the coming BlackBerry Z10 smartphone or its qwerty cousin, the Q10. I had done a review of the Z10 and found the underlying BlackBerry 10 OS to be very good. Based on my experience, I thought there might be some genuine interest.
What I found is that nobody, out of about 20 CIOs and senior VP's of IT, that I spoke to said they would be endorsing or adopting the platform, except for one CIO who pulled out his current BlackBerry and said, "I only use BlackBerry because my boss wants us to." He suggested his boss might require continuing with BlackBerry 10 and the Z10.
At a luncheon during the P100 event, I also asked a group of eight CIOs at my table if anybody was moving to the new BlackBerry device, and everybody but the current BlackBerry user shook his head "no" and some even grunted, almost in disgust. They indicated that it was the BlackBerry outage in the fall of 2011, and the company's slow rollout of its latest OS and devices that had been their biggest concerns.
