On Friday morning at 10 AM I was having a lively discussion with an acquaintance about Microsoft vs RIM. This individual asserted that it was only a matter of time before Microsoft passed RIM. I pointed out that RIM had some advantages that differentiated its products, including its network operations center and the business models which it allows. There's a certain irony, I suppose, to the fact that as I was having this conversation, RIM service across United States was apparently down. It's unclear whether Friday morning's RIM outage affected us in Canada. Certainly the BlackBerry's we own at iotum were unaffected, but that's because we run BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and don't rely on the carrier BIS service.
That's two major outages in a year for RIM. How many "nines" of reliability does that represent? Should we have the same expectations for reliability from the BlackBerry service as phone service?
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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It doesn’t matter how many nines you got, people want tens. You could be down for 1 minute per year and they would bitch if they couldn’t SMS their girlfriend about their new shoes for that 1 minute