After a worldwide message server outage at Research in Motion (RIM) affected 70 million BlackBerry users around the world Oct. 12, RIM should be worried about losing successful corporations as clients, said Ian Lee, a professor at Carleton’s Sprott School of Business.
“Blackberry used to be known for its reliability and security and now that their servers have gone down it leaves many businesses unfunctionable,” Lee said. “The public is now starting to become skeptical of the promises the BlackBerry corporation once made.”
Though students could still text and call during the blackout, businesses weren’t able to communicate within their corporations, Lee said.
“During an outage, their whole corporation shuts down. They aren’t able to send emails throughout the company,” Lee said. “They lose their instant computers, they lose their way of communicating.”
Although RIM “worked around the clock to get [the] glitches fixed,” it wasn’t until three days after the start of the blackouts in Europe that all RIM networks were restored, according to a company service update.
Leah Hancharuk, first-year history student at Carleton, said she was already having issues with her BlackBerry before the outage.
“I have a low opinion of RIM because of my experience with my BlackBerry breaking,” Hancharuk said. “The outage didn’t really change my opinion, other than reinforce my current feelings.”
Alexandra Haggert, a third-year film studies student, said the outage didn’t affect her as much.
“The outage was at the very most an annoyance,” Haggert said. “I did just fine all day texting and calling anyone that I needed to talk to.”
Haggert said a one-day glitch in the system wouldn’t affect her opinion on BlackBerry products.
But the glitches have still led some to wonder what all this means for RIM’s future. Lee said RIM is also facing the problem of not being able to attract young people to their products.
“BlackBerry is so successful with business corporations because it’s engineers selling products to engineers. This is in comparison to Apple who focuses on what the consumer wants,” Lee said. “Steve Jobs understood what consumers wanted even if they didn’t know they wanted it.”
Despite all the problems, Lee said he’s a BlackBerry user and will remain loyal to the brand.
