To make a long story short, BlackBerry outages suck, and when you have your second major one in less than a years time, people start to think you suck.
RIM need not worry about about a mass exodus or anything like that. They do, however, need to start acting like the “big boy” service provider that they are. Two major outages in less than a year is simply not acceptable and no one would put up with this if it were from a wireless carrier.
I’m not saying that wireless carriers don’t have issues. They just don’t seem to affect as many people for as long a period of time as BlackBerry outages do.
Come on guys… Fix this. Build more data centers to distribute your risk. Do whatever you need to do to keep this from happening again.
I think you’re being a bit harsh there Robb. Bearing in mind that RIM’s infrastructure is so large that it has a network operations centre, then compare the number of users (almost 10 million) to the amount of outage there has been in the last, say, 3 years; that’s a tiny amount of downtime.
A lot of people were bitching about this on BlackBerry Forums this morning claiming they were going to look at other solutions if it continued which I think is insane. BlackBerry is miles ahead of any competition in every arena overall, and I’m sure the only reason people get annoyed is because the solution is so good and so critical to them, that it really hurts when they don’t have it working. What are those people going to do, move to a slower and less stable solution just so they don’t have to deal with a couple of cases of outage a year at network level?
When I first wrote this, I thought that I was being harsh too, however after thinking about it, this is as much about perception as anything else.
Reality tells me that RIM has had very little down time over the passed ten years. My perception however is that twice in the last year I’ve had a multi day email outage.
RIM simply has to do better.
You are not being harsh at all. As a new Blackberry customer, I really could care less about reliability records from two years ago, I want a reliable network NOW. RIM is raking in new customers, and it meeds to keep its infrastructure on pace to support them. Users want a bulletproof solution, a Kevlar vest with a few defects doesn’t get the job done.
Is your annoyance out of the fact they should do better, or out of the fact that you’re a user who’s had to deal with the frustration of not having the service working for a period of time?
If you look at it from a purely technical perspective then the uptime is outstanding and you simply could not get annoyed. There is an arguement (which you kind of touched on) that correctly states that as time goes on then fail safe should be better, but the flipside of that is look how many more users RIM have had in the last 2 years (almost 5 million, double the user base) let alone at any other time.
To say RIM should do better is like me saying that I’m annoyed my Ferrari only does 194 MPH, not 198 MPH.
NO! Robb is dead on correct with his thoughts on this. Grow a set and STOP trying to defend and make excuses for what shouldn’t be. Whining about well deserved criticism is the sad standard fanboy approach to everything, I for one am sick of it. A old windoz or palm device which is not up to RIM BB standards could continue getting email, yet because of the way RIM has set up the BB when there is a failure BB users are screwed until the system can be restored.
Research in Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie:
“It was a process error that we had that’s been fixed. It shouldn’t have happened, and it won’t happen again,” Balsillie said. “It wasn’t a corruption of any form of the infrastructure, and that’s very important. We’re clearly putting a lot more fault tolerance into the system, a lot more capacity. We’re having domain failover architectures; we’re having business continuity solutions experts, so from that component piece of the infrastructure, that’s not going to happen again.”
Keep up the good work Robb! Call it like it is. If others don’t like it they can go over to that embarrassment blackberryUNcool which is nothing but a rumor and FUD mongering mess.
I’m simply looking at this from a technical perspective not the user “my BlackBerry doesn’t work so I’m spitting my dummy out”. Don’t get me wrong, as a paying user you’re entitled too, but I’d take RIM’s architecture of the NOC over the Exchange Direct Push route with no NOC any day. I’m not kissing RIM’s arse on this, I don’t need to, but I’ve got some realism.
You’re also all assuming that this problem is the same as the last outage, and we don’t know that it is. Does outage suck – hell yeah, but when all is said and done is BlackBerry a more robust solution than anything else on the market – YES.
Still what do I know, I’m only MCTS certified in Windows Mobile, I’ve only being working with 100 BES servers and thousands of BlackBerry users for four years and I’m only a Mod on the largest online community dedicated to BlackBerry – I’m hardly what you’d call an expert!!!!! 🙂
And hellno, just for clarification as you seem to think there is some side taking to be had here, I understand Robb’s frustration and I too enjoy reading this blog, it undoubtedly has the best domain name of any BlackBerry blog on the net and rightly has its place in my Firefox toolbar!!!
I was going to create a blog about the Motorola Q, however, the domain name Questionable.com was already taken. 🙂
That is a good one Robb. I laughed outloud when I read that.
More IS expected from RIM and the BB service than technology from micro$haft. Robb is pointing out the truth. True technology does from time to time hiccup BUT RIM has now hiccuped twice in what 5 months? This after our CEO claimed it wouldn’t happen again. Stupid words from a smart guy, but he said it. RIM’s BB service has a rather narrow source, when the network goes down just about everyone has no RIM BB service. There must be a better way, and as Robb (without his MCTS certification) correctly states (without posting his resume) “RIM simply has to do better.”
Customers know that, RIM and Blackberry fans know that, and there is nothing too harsh that can be said about it. BB service is what RIM does, they must get it right all the time.