RIM's Single Point of Failure

This article has 12 comments:

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  User 162827

  Mar 11 04:40 PM

  My Website
  This is a crazy statement. You are going to tell me that two minor outages in a year is bad service? Cellular telephones in general could not compare to that with the number of dropped calls and no service areas they have. Blackberry users can afford to miss out every once in awhile unless the are obsessive compulsive e-mail freaks. It's not that big of a deal so settle down old man.
  
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  User 162827

  Mar 11 04:42 PM

  My Website
  By the way, you are obsessed with Apple.
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  Dale

  Mar 11 05:09 PM
  The author should state he is long APPL - unless his position is now different than it was back in January. After a brief review of his last several posts gushing over APPL and their upcoming dominance of the smart phone market it is pretty clear he is reacting to the February stats on smartphones - "Surprisingly, the iPhone also slid for the second consecutive month in our survey, garnering 1% of mentions versus 7% last month and 14% in December," the survey read.
  If you are going to pump your stock by criticizing another, at lease have the common courtesy to state your long positions. I expect better from Seeking Alpha! www.thestreet.com/_yah...;cm_cat=FREE&c...
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  Hayweed

  Mar 11 05:44 PM
  What if Verizon's phone service for the country went down for 3 hours. I bet that Congress would hold hearings. Considering that state and federal agencies use the blackberry they should demand better. Carl is dead on with this story.
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  bryanz

  Mar 12 03:02 AM
  I love the AAPL comments. I don't think before this article I'd ever seen one written by the author that didn't promoted AAPL. Of course, this article is nothing more than a thinly-veiled promotion of AAPL's recent announcement that the iPhone will work with Exchange. I haven't read much into the implementation of the technology yet, but if it's like GOOD for Windows Mobile smart phones, then businesses typically either use a BES or use a Goodlink server. If a business already has a BES, they probably aren't going to drop all their BBs and run out and buy iPhones and a Goodlink server. The outage stories I feel are overblown. Uptime is still well above 99%. The most recent outage apparently occurred as a result of adding increased capacity rather than some glaring glitch in the system that caused the service to choke. That being said, AAPL will certainly make some inroads into the business market, but RIMM will also make inroads into the consumer market as they've been doing with the Pearl and the Curve, and they're prepping to do with the 9000 series. New software upgrades will render HTML emails as part of the OS and will allow video recording.
  
  For the record, I'm long both AAPL and RIMM.
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  Blue collar
  guy

  Mar 12 08:44 AM
  Well............Duh!!!... on the "for the record" but I don't believe the "long" on RIMM; more likely SHORT.
  and......by the record. I don't use anything in the technological that doesn't go down at least twice per month and that includes satellite, cable, wireless and whatever else being foisted on the U.S. consumer complete with glitches.
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  carol b

  Mar 12 09:09 AM

  My Website
  Your loyalty is showing and it's on the side of RIMM!
  You must not work in corporate America..i.e. a fortune 500 company where things like down time for systems of any kind happen at least 4-5 times in any year. I have and employees exalt these times as favor from above.
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  tom1234

  Mar 12 09:20 AM
  i am long on aapl---rimm is a good phone ---rimm is a one trick pony ---unless they have entered the diverse fields like an aapl--i just like aapl better and not just their iphone alone--
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  snarfuffle

  Mar 12 01:18 PM
  I think we can be more zen about this situation. I agree, small outages should not be compared to terribly inefficient points of contact for support 24 hours a day from other service providers. I have had a RIM BlackBerry device attached to the side of my tumor for the past 8 years. The few and far between service outages have been excellent points of reality to how valuable the service is when it is up and also a good resting point to remind us that there are things that can wait and work life balance is healthy. I feel my tumor shrink during those outages and my kids see the whites of my eyes. Chill out and accept that RIM handles their support and technology with decent effeciency and still dominate the corporate business wireless solutions.
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  .crazylegs..

  Mar 12 04:26 PM
  I greatly respect Carl's opinions on Apple as he always has very intelligent things to say, usually on the marketing side of things. Too bad his recent change of employment doesn't allow him to post as much on the company.
  
  That being said, I believe this piece is comedy. RIM's "single point of failure" could be compared to iPhone's "single" point of failure if EDGE on ATT were to go down and one didn't have wifi access. Then what?
  
  RIM's long term service reliability speaks for itself and as one poster above noted, the core system is extremely reliable with outages only occurring when upgrades or tweaks are being applied. This doesn't excuse the outage, but it is a noteworthy point, that the core system just tends to work (kind of like a Mac!). No doubt I do hope RIM increases the number of NOCs from 2 to 4 or 8 to achieve redundancies on top of redundancies. It should be noted, though, that there currently is a third secretly located NOC for certain customers that require 100% uptime (read US gov't) that was put in place after the outage last year.
  
  I'm long both AAPL and RIMM because it obvious to see the growth of smartphone adoption worldwide is huge and both are positioned in the space to benefit. (There are many more reasons than iPhone to own AAPL, but that's for another time)
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  JIM

  Mar 13 02:23 PM
  Someone must be paranoid here; I don't see one mention of A---E. Carl studiously avoided it. Seems we all know the 800lb gorilla that was not mentioned anywhere here.... Go A---E!
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  nietschele

  Mar 20 11:16 AM
  There should be a rule that writers who are supposed to be neutral -- after all, people read information to get the facts, not bolster their own opinions -- have to state their positions and bias. Carl, your piece is a blatant example -- I expected a lot better from Seeking Alpha.