Crafty or Crazy? BlackBerry CEO Wants 'App Neutrality'

BlackBerry CEO John Chen is asking President Obama, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and various congressional committee members to apply the Net neutrality concept tomobile  apps. The move would essentially force companies to provide apps for all platforms.

"Neutrality must be mandated at the application and content layer if we truly want a free, open and non-discriminatory Internet," Chen said in a lengthy post on the Inside BlackBerry blog. "All wireless broadband customers must have the ability to access any lawful applications and content they choose, and applications/content providers must be prohibited from discriminating based on the customer’s mobile operating system."

Chen's post brought critics out of the woodwork.

"As a BlackBerry app developer, I think this is a terrible idea," said Brian Knapp, leaving a comment on the blog. "You get developers to build for you by having a compelling platform, not by trying to force them to build for your platform."

"Enforced content/app neutrality is a terrible idea," said commenter Alastair Houghton. "There are all kinds of reasons why developers might choose not to support BlackBerry phones, and mandating that they do (whether themselves or via a third-party) is an onerous restriction that will dissuade people from developing software or services in the first place."

Risky Business

Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, said developers go where the volume is -- but this tends to support dominant companies and put smaller ones at a huge disadvantage.

"Let's put Blackberry aside and look at Apple, but not iOS but MacOS. It is still a really small player in the PC world, largely because the volume of Macs keeps lots of business developers from putting the same effort into Mac apps as they would Windows," Enderle told us. "Linux just doesn't get great apps, for instance. Granted it isn't exactly user-friendly either, but even if it was it likely couldn't get to critical mass."

Finally, Enderle said, Microsoft has actually created a decent mobile platform but faces the same problem Apple does on PCs -- the company doesn't have the volume to get the apps, and without the apps you can't get to the volume. As Enderle sees it, the only way to get around this is to pivot the market like Apple did with the iPhone and iPad. That, of course, is incredibly risky because the market may not want to pivot.

State-Mandated Neutrality

"Pivoting is where you convince people you are unique and desirable so they flock to you and whatever apps you have are good enough," Enderle said. "If there were a state-mandated app platform, then the operating systems would have to support it and smaller companies could better compete in existing markets."

Unfortunately, Enderle said, states aren't really set up to do something like this, in part, because they tend to lag significantly in technology. That said, Enderle noted that Canada (where BlackBerry is based) could mandate a form of app neutrality to help BlackBerry, and Korea could do the same to help Samsung because both firms are seen as important to their nations.

"I actually think this is better for the industry because once-dominant companies tend to sit on the market and cost-reduce their products as Microsoft did with IE 6 and IBM did with the mainframe in the '80s," Enderle said. 'Microsoft lost its dominance and IBM almost went out of business, where if the market had remained more competitive both firms likely would have remained more focused on improving their offerings and not reducing costs and better avoided these outcomes."