By George Mensah
The BlackBerry is hailed for its revolutionary impact on wireless and mobile businesspeople. However, last week, it was anything but revolutionary, as a network outage swept across North America. With many users clearly regarding their BlackBerry as an extension of their physical beings, this nightmarish scenario left a bitter after-taste in the mouths of many, who were left reeling for two days with ‘CrackBerry’ withdrawal symptoms.
OK, that might sound like a joke, but there are wider implications in terms of how seriously RIM are taking research and testing. It’s true that all networks are subject to technical difficulties at one time or another - but one would think that RIM, an organisation that is estimated to have around 45% of the market for smart phones, wouldn’t be in a position to fall foul of something this big?
In a statement (eventually) released by RIM, it attributed the failure to “the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine” (‘non-critical’ is a nice irony). But despite this seemingly plausible jargon, customers, journalists and analysts alike were left to wonder why this outage had been able to happen in the first place.
In my opinion, this is only going to foster ill will in the future, as RIM has still not released a full analysis of the shutdown, neither has it indicated it has the means to avoid it happening again. Consumers have been given the impression that the BlackBerry is the king of the smart-phone world, with RIM promising on its website “platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information” – but its crown will certainly be under threat if an incident like this happens again.
As a high-end phone user, I can assuredly say that consumers want added functionality from smart phones. After all, it’s the full-featured capabilities that are attractive. But what every user needs first and foremost is reliability. This localised failure by RIM should be a lesson about the need to test systems fully before offering a service designed to cater for high-end users fixated with 24-hour communications – if it’s not heeded, RIM might be surprised to find just how quickly people are able to kick the BlackBerry habit.
(Oh dear, looks like RIM’s knocking heads with Microsoft now...)
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