How do we not have this yet?

Question

I'm an early adopter of the Z10. I've been sticking by Blackberry and promoting them as much as possible. I really do believe it's a superior experience, and it helps me get things done every day.
With that said, in some respects, my Bold 9700 offered things that we just don't yet have on the BB10 platform. I've asked many people, and nobody can give me a straight answer on what's preventing us from at least matching what I was used to for years on the OS6 platform... Here are my 2 "worst offender" examples, and a reason why we need them:
MS Lync without requiring BES10: I work for a huge company. Unfortunately, I'm watching all of the old company BB devices get turned into iPhones over the past 2 weeks, because a year ago, they went with Mobile Iron to solve their BYOD situation. There was no BES10 then to help solve the problem. We likely will never see BES10 turned on, so I have to run with ActiveSync. Our entire organization communicates with MS Lync, and now I am unable to use this from my phone, so I feel very disconnected. Sure, I get email and calendar to sync with no problem, but I'm missing Lync and it affects my work environment daily. Nobody can tell me of any technical reason why a Lync client cannot work over ActiveSync - likely because it works for Windows phone and Android. Let's get this fixed right away, please!
Speech - reading emails, voice reply to emails: On OS6, I used DriveSave.ly and it would read incoming texts and emails as they arrived. I could drive and remain hands free with my bluetooth earpiece, and never even be tempted to look at the phone. BB10 has a really great speech engine - the navigation app uses it, and other software like SayIt seems to be quite "voice capable". I've even reached out to the developers of SayIt to see if they would add this functionality, so that I'd buy the app instantly. After months and several emails, I haven't heard back. I'm not sure if there's some missing API item that makes it impossible for this type of app in BB10, or what the issue could be. But for a platform that's supposed to be all about productivity, it amazes me that we don't yet have anything that hits on this at all. Please, let's find out what's needed so we can have some apps jump on this huge gap.
I'm hoping that someone here can at least address what's preventing us from getting these solutions. Do you know? Have you heard anything? Does this bother you, too?

Answer 1

The main reason why the BBIM client requires BES10 is because RIM builds their IM client to be a generic piece of software which talks to the BES, and the BES is responsible for communication between itself and whatever Instant Messaging solution an organization is using.
From the perspective of BlackBerry, it's not just a "Lync client", it's a generic Microsoft Office Communications Server, Lync Server, IBM Lotus Sametime, and Novell GroupWise Messenger client. This allows BlackBerry to have one client regardless of which Instant Messaging back-end an organization might be using.
Note that the BlackBerry IM client only provides IM with Lync, you can't do audio/video chat or any of the telephony functions like you can on iOS or Android.
That said, it's not much help if the organization doesn't use BES10, but I can't see BlackBerry developing their own Lync client. You'd have more luck pressuring Microsoft to build a Lync client like they have done for iOS and Android, and if they did it you'd probably get a lot more functionality anyway. Good luck with that is all I can say...
FYI, the Lync client doesn't use ActiveSync which is a protocol used by Exchange for email sync to mobile devices, it uses a secured SSL session through your firewall. But, the end result is that you can access your Lync environment from anywhere which is what matters I suppose.
For your second question, it's mostly about incentive and money. The amount of money required for a developer to write a native BlackBerry 10 version of their app, or even port their Android app to BB10, can be significant. Even for a fairly simple port you can be looking at tens of thousands of dollars of time and money spent. Many developers just don't see the benefit in doing so given the relatively low number of BB10 devices sold (keeping in mind that while 3 million sold is a big number to your or me, it's not that big compared to the number of iOS and Android devices on the market), or can't justify the cost in relation to potential revenue from the platform.
BESX 5.0.4, SQL 2008, Exchange 2010 SP2 RU4a