RIM’s soft underbelly: network outages: Piqued BlackBerry users quick to forget, forgive

When you turn on the tap, water simply flows out, right? Nothing to it.
The same assumption holds true for many if not most BlackBerry users, who tend to rely on the device and the service from Research In Motion Ltd., for uninterrupted, 24/7 e-mail service. How it works, or the system’s complexity, is rarely considered.
BlackBerry users were stymied again on Monday as BlackBerry service went silent over an undisclosed but apparently widespread portion of North America at about 3:30 p.m. EST; the situation lasted, according to RIM, for about three hours. RIM said messages were delayed but not lost.
The outage may have been responsible for RIM’s brief stock dip this morning – it lost about a dollar after the bell, before rising again to about $94.16 at midday.
The primary question, when such blackouts occur – this is the third in the past two calendar years – is whether a temporary outage will alienate BlackBerry users enough to send them into another company’s arms. The secondary question, pondered by those within the wireless industry, is whether networks as complex as RIM’s, with about 12 million users worldwide, can ever be fool-proof.
The second question, of course, has no definitive answer. The answer to the first question is TBD.
RIM’s blue-chip consumers fork over several hundred dollars for a device and hundreds of dollars per year for the service – the envy of device makers and service providers who continue to chase RIM’s position. So, when perhaps inevitably, BlackBerry service is temporarily interrupted, the enterprise and government customers who rely on the device and service tend to howl like wounded lapdogs.
Blame typically focuses on the major wireless carriers who resell the service, not on RIM. And RIM issues public statements on the outages only upon request; it does not post such statements on its Web site. Apparently, the company is leery of confirming outages via its own corporate record.
While that tends to annoy the type-A personalities that rely on the service, few jump ship. RIM’s subscriber base has grown by leaps and bounds over the past three years, from about 4.3 million in November 2005 to about 12 million by the end of last year, according to The Wall Street Journal online.
Today, RIM provided a statement via its public relations agency, Brodeur Worldwide, whose spokeswoman asked not to be identified because she was not a RIM employee. Thus the arms-length position RIM takes when it incurs the wrath of its faithful customers.
The statement acknowledged “intermittent delays” in e-mail service in “the Americas” from 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., while voice and SMS service “operated normally.”
“RIM continues to focus on providing industry-leading reliability in its products and services and apologizes to customers for any inconvenience,” the statement read. “RIM is continuing to investigate the exact cause…”
A day-long outage and slowdown in e-mail traffic last hit RIM and its customers Sept. 7-8, when the company initially remained silent and subsequently delivered an opaque explanation for the cause. Prior to that, in April 2007, another outage lasting about 10 hours produced a similar pattern of outcry from customers and muted response from the company.
At that time, analyst Maynard Um at UBS wrote in a note to investors – which might be repeated upon this occasion:
“We believe this issue will raise speculation that enterprises may look more aggressively to other solutions. (However) we do believe that RIM continues to maintain at least a one-to-two-year lead over its competitors … and do not expect replacements near/midterm.”