It Hits the RIM and Bounces Out…

When you have an older service model, problems just seem to build and build:

http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/industry-insights/technology/blackberry-breakdown-is-death-sentence

Update in Bloomberg Businessweek: http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9QC2MF80.htm

The latest outage and performance issues with the Blackberry service is another indication that the executives at RIM have not moved with the times.  This has nothing to do with the quality of the network and server equipment or software that RIM employs to provide their service.  I am confident that they have updated their network and systems numerous times over the last several years to keep up with what they fooled themselves into believe would be never ending growth.

What has changed, or really dramatically improved, is the Internet services model that is the foundation of the competition between the major wireless carriers.  The “3G” wars have moved into “4G” and it is becoming about Mbps of LTE services and how many Gigabytes per month before you are sent to the penalty box (or, a very expensive bill).  These Internet services are the “Cloud” services that people are demanding.  With fully capable Internet Web-browsers on smartphones, the days of needing the Blackberry servers (in Canada) translating Web pages and serving a limited capability on Blackberry device are long gone.  The same is true for email.  Most people get their mail from a provider that is fully happy to provide IMAP or POP3 access to their servers (or, in some cases a proprietary phone App) directly over an Internet connection.  The need to go through a centralized email server complex (again through Canada?) just does not exist anymore.

Update: Along with my comparison with DEC (and below with the darkest times at Apple), here is another very good analysis:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/96f52cf4-f5c5-11e0-bcc2-00144feab49a.html#axzz1ake0JZ6r

The article in the Financial Times points out that RIM's focus on "the email application" is a "hard-wired attitude" that is very much like Wang Laboratories was with dedicated Word Processing systems.  In addition, the article points out that RIM has some stability as an important portion of its customer base are the slow moving government and legal sectors.  My comments is that this is exactly the problem, reinforcing the focus on simple messaging.

From an economic and technical standpoint, RIM has built a structure that is a real challenge for their continued success:

• People want their Gmail, Google Apps Services, Hotmail, and other similar capabilities.  The complex of Blackberry servers and network provides zero value to a customer and only additional cost to RIM
• RIMs costs for developing and maintaining several operating systems again only adds additional cost
• Application developers see a much larger platform space with Android and iOS.   What value does the Blackberry App World have long-term for developers?
• Blackberry was originally perceived as a strong business-class tool set which included both devices and services, including the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES).  Again, RIM has to provide support for something that business will more and more determine adds little or no value to their IT environment.  Lower revenue for RIM and more cost to spread across the business

With the passing of Steve Jobs, the Blackberry product line today reminds me of Apple before Steve returned to Apple.  My first comparison was to DEC, back in April 2011:

http://kaplowtech.blogspot.com/2011/04/rim-goes-way-of-dec.html

Before his return, Apple was teetering on the edge of complete failure.  There were a succession of Macs that were at once all the same, different, and unremarkable. In addition there was the famed (infamous) operating system failure called Copeland.  Before that there was “Pink” and “Taligent” all tremendous wastes of time and effort.  Eventually, it was the NeXTSTEP operating system, from that Steve Jobs company NeXT that eventually saved the day.  And, of course it was the man himself returning to Apple and re-inventing Apple back into the company that develops “Insanely Great” products.

Without someone executive at RIM that is going to develop a Laser focus culture on differentiating their products and making them at least “Great”, making apologies for service outages will be the least of their worries.