John Gruber (Daringfireball.net) writes about iPhone vs. Blackberry and says:
RIM doesn’t really have any lock-in other than user habits. The BlackBerry gimmick is that it works with the email system your company bought from Microsoft.
Which is not really true. I don't know what % of RIM's revenues come from their server products, but I do know the Blackberry -> Exchange integration is more complicated that just the user buying their own phone and hooking it up themselves.
The blackberry solution offers an "internet free" solution. Your exchange servers don't need to talk to the internet, they live buried in your firewall, passing messages to RIM's network, that sends them via the proper mobile carrier. That might not be the perfect description, but point is, there's network connections, server products, and support costs. I don't think the iPhone will be a drop-in replacement in large companies. Enterprises have built-in lock in. With the blackberry solution, the IT department is in charge of provisioning all the phones, and if I don't get the blessed, provisioned phone from them I can't even have a blackberry.
It remains to be seen exactly what the iPhone's solution is going to take to deploy. Or whether it will without a server be able to offer all the ticky-tacky big-brother things that enterprises love (disabling the web browser, or the camera, or the iPod, keeping logs on all calls, etc.). We'll know more once it's released.
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