What Does the BlackBerry Outage Mean for the Company? - The UpStream

What Does the BlackBerry Outage Mean for the Company?

posted Friday Oct 14, 2011 by Scott Ertz

What Does the BlackBerry Outage Mean for the Company?

Research in Motion has been having a lot of trouble competing in the new smartphone world. When it was just them, Palm and Microsoft it was an easy world to compete in; everyone had a large marketshare because of the differing values. In the new world, with Apple and Google taking aim at a new way to use your phone, and Microsoft revamping their OS from scratch, sticking to your core and not making major changes to keep up is a nearly impossible game to win.

At least BlackBerry has been able to stay alive with their perceived level of security. RIM has always stayed where they are in the business world because of their encryption of everything that passes through the phone, but in the modern world there are a lot of ways to accomplish that without BlackBerry. Therefore, the worst thing that could have happened was a long outage of the BlackBerry servers. Unfortunately that is exactly what happened this week.

Why is this outage such a big deal for RIM? Hit the break to find out.

Mere days before their developer conference, BlackBerry experienced the longest outage they have had in years. Unfortunately for those attending the conference, this means more explanation as to why BlackBerry should still be in business rather than explanation of how and why to develop for BlackBerry OS7, the QNX-powered PlayBook and the upcoming QNX-powered phones.

When apps rule the world, and your platform has less apps being published than the almost entirely abandoned webOS, a developer conference having to prove to customers why your platform will still exist in the next year is a killer.

Hopefully BlackBerry will be able to pull themselves out of this hole and, with the launch of the QNX-platformed phones, can begin the transition away from the old BB servers and start a new era for their brand.

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