RIM CEO says BlackBerry shutdown "won't happen again"; BlackBerry addicts yell "it better not!"
By Conrad Quilty-Harper 
posted May 13th 2007 10:08PM
posted May 13th 2007 10:08PM
We know, we know, you're still shaking from the "BlackBerry blackout" the other month: fortunately, the co-CEO of RIM Jim Balsillie feels your shakes. In an interview with eWeek, Jim let the company's customers know that a blackout on a similar scale as April's outage will not happen again. As we know, the cause of the outage was insufficient testing, and Jim now admits that it was "completely avoidable," which probably isn't the best way to boost confidence. As RIM goes about learning from its big mistake, Jim stated that when the service did go down, vital public safety areas were the first to be pushed back online. Only later on did the consumer section go back up (with a flurry of "omg wut hapened?" emails, no doubt.) Hopefully, now you'll be able to go back to your completely technology reliant life in peace, although we doubt that customers will be fully convinced by Jim's reassurances. Hey, it could be worse: at least he didn't try to rebrand the outage as an international day of "thumb rest."
"and Jim now admits that it was "completely avoidable," which probably isn't the best way to boost confidence."
Yes, it is. No one can promise 100% uptime and, despite the title of this article, no one is. They've analyzed the problem, they know why it happened, and that it didn't have to, and they have fixed the system to try preventing it in the future. And they've been up-front and honest about it. This is all that can be done.
What *would* be worrying is if they actually promised they'd never have downtime again. This is an unrealistic promise, and making it is a sure indication that you don't know what you're talking about.
"and Jim now admits that it was "completely avoidable," which probably isn't the best way to boost confidence."
Yes, it is. No one can promise 100% uptime and, despite the title of this article, no one is. They've analyzed the problem, they know why it happened, and that it didn't have to, and they have fixed the system to try preventing it in the future. And they've been up-front and honest about it. This is all that can be done.
What *would* be worrying is if they actually promised they'd never have downtime again. This is an unrealistic promise, and making it is a sure indication that you don't know what you're talking about.
There are other "mail push" technologies and most of them do not depend on a single server in Canada.
SyncML is free on Nokia/SonyEricsson.
There are also Intellisync's Wireless E-Mail Express, JP Mobile's Surewave Mobile Connect & Nextworks Nexchange. All of them work and do not have a single point of failure.