I don’t suppose I should be too surprised that we got more online comments and emails relating to our posts on the ‘Blackberry Saga’ last week than for any story in our history.
Fortunately on Thursday the three day outage finally finished. We held our breath in case it would fail again but looks like we are back in business.
The episode has several lessons:
1 – RIM handled its PR quite abysmally. It will go down as a textbook ‘how not to do it’. They should have issued statements – particularly via Twitter and text – immediately and regularly. Even if they were of the “We are still down. We care. Sorry” variety.
2 – Many users were appalled to learn that the whole network could be brought down (for so long) by a fault at just one data centre. Relying on such a fragile network is just not acceptable in today’s world.
3 – We/I were relatively unaffected because our email systems are duplicated on the web. I just found a WiFi area (Starbucks) and looked on my iPad. This consumer-based approach proved much more reliable. Indeed many corporations will now realise that this is a more resilient approach. This can only accelerate the move to BYOT and, indeed, Apple in general.
4 – It was, of course, very bad for RIM. Will they recover? We now suspect that the days of RIM as an independent company are numbered. The buyer? Well, Microsoft would be one candidate I guess. Particularly suitable given the corporate bias in both organisations.
But maybe RIM will be the Noughties equivalent of the FiloFax. It will just fade into a distant memory of how things used to be.