Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
|
All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
|
|
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
BlackBerry outage hints at service flaws
Update 20070421: BlackBerry: The Cover-Up Is Worse Than The Outage indicates a certain level of arrogance on RIM's part, very similar to the attitude IBM had when it was in an IT monopoly many years ago, and that maybe Microsoft has today (but not quite the same). We all know what happened then: Novell and Microsoft took over networking software, Dell, Compaq and Asia took over PCs, Sun and others took over heavy-duty servers. Of course RIM is a very small player compared to IBM, but by locking in wireless e-mail users to RIM's solution its impact is still significant in that segment.
Update 20070419: BlackBerry outage exposes RIM's 'soft underbelly' points out that all e-mails go via RIM's central system, which is not a very clever design, load- and security-wise. Even the US government reacted to the outage, indicating how much BlackBerries are relied upon among the few that have them. As I said in the note: RIM needs competition.
There's been a massive outage since Tuesday, supposedly inhibiting most BlackBerry users to access the service. A few questions immediately pop up:
Update 20070419: BlackBerry outage exposes RIM's 'soft underbelly' points out that all e-mails go via RIM's central system, which is not a very clever design, load- and security-wise. Even the US government reacted to the outage, indicating how much BlackBerries are relied upon among the few that have them. As I said in the note: RIM needs competition.
There's been a massive outage since Tuesday, supposedly inhibiting most BlackBerry users to access the service. A few questions immediately pop up:
- How can the effect be so broad?
- Isn't the user lookup service distributed?
- Is there only one lookup server in the whole world?
The actual transfer of messages is handled by the corporate-internal BlackBerry Connect, so what is so critical in the central service that this can happen?
There's serious need for a competitor to RIM, for these reasons:- RIM's service architecture is clearly outdated. Such a critical system must be distributed.
- RIM gets way too much media attention (and completely for free, even though an outage is obviously not good news), despite an unnoticeable sales volume relative to the mobile phone market as a whole.
- There's definite potential in this market, yet due to patents etc few others dare to approach it.
