FINANCIAL TIMES: An absence that was once a mild irritation for a minority is now a big inconvenience for tens of millions. In 2007, when a widespread network problem first left the thumbs of BlackBerry addicts twitching redundantly, only about 8m used the service. That number has since ballooned to 70m, and mobile email and messaging have been transformed from a handy way to keep in touch into both a core tool of business life and a cherished aid to social existence.
This week’s network failure, the worst in the BlackBerry’s 12-year history, has come at a bad time for Research In Motion, the Canadian company behind the service. Already losing ground to more versatile handsets from Apple and companies using Google’s smartphone software, it has fumbled the transition to touchscreen devices of its own that were meant to put it back on the map…
For followers of the company, who have now seen network outages for five consecutive years, this has been hard to stomach. “Every time, it has been traced to a lack of thorough disaster planning,” says Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner, an information technology research firm. Repeated promises to do better have failed to improve things and long-standing customers are now losing patience with these repeated slips, he adds… (more)
