The ghost of Steve Jobs seems to be well and truly active. Having been liberated from his earthly shackles, it appears to outside observers that RIM's network is under an outside influence that, surely, can only be phantasmic Steve.
KitGuru douses itself in holy water to investigate how the Crackberry network has become, well, cracked.
.
While HTC has pioneered the Android platform like there's no tomorrow and Apple has brought phone design and interface standards to never-before-seen levels, Blackberry has been chugging along as ‘the reliable solution'.
No matter how fast and fancy the opposition gets, if you absolutely-positively-definitely need to get your email 24×7, anywhere on the planet, then you choose Blackberry. Or at least, that was the story historically.
Obama was prised away from his when he took office and then, just a few short days later, it was back in his possession. Even the head of the US government could not be without his email receiver for a couple of days.
So what about the rest of the business world? How long are people prepared to put up with broken email?
Not long, from what we can tell. A straw poll of business people around the office complex that houses Pro Class TV said that the ‘only reason they had not moved to Apple was Blackberry's superior messaging' and that, without Blackberry's old reliability, why wouldn't you choose the ‘nicer looking phone'?
The messaging problems have extended to Blackberry's own communications. Earlier, they were telling major news sites like V3 that ‘everything is fine, it has all been fixed', but today Blackberry's Vice President of Software and Services, Rory O'Neill, has been telling the same reporters “…unable to categorically say which services were being affected at present due to the complexity of the firm's network”.
Whoops.
It's impressive that the millions and millions of dollars that Blackberry has spent sponsoring top TV shows like ‘The Sopranos' with the message ‘Tell your story', should have been completely destroyed in a matter of days – simply because Blackberry does not understand its own network.
The mystery of why Blackberry's logo is a series of ‘disconnected lumps' now seems a little clearer.
KitGuru says: It's lucky for Blackberry that the moment its vast network decides to go tits-up, Apple has not launched a powerful new phone in a blaze of publicity. Oh. Wait.
Comment below or in the KitGuru forums.
Best “Kitguru says: ” Ever.
Funny 🙂
Friend of mine is one of the hot-shots Blackberry recently took on to work on their brand image and turn things around. Haven’t heard from him this week, expect he’s hanging from a lamp-fitting…