RIM co-CEO issues public apology for ongoing BlackBerry outage [updated]

20 minutes of his life back daily from not trolling on RIM articles on iBGR.. that is pretty much it.

You would go away too, that would make the world a better place.

@c009b00976ca25649d53f2a08121b9f1:disqus – If you don’t want to deal with me, I’ll make life simple for you… STOP TROLLING ON RIM ARTICLES!!  How is that you?   What is funny, is you start talking *hit and then expect not to get any back. 

And my going away would not make the world a better place. I can guarantee that I volunteer in my community far more than your iDouche Starbucks arse does.

i updated my moms iphone just fine, took like 5 minutes bra. endgadget and other blogs have the same articles i don’t really think its anti RIM, more like cant miss the newest “RIM failed really hard today when they…(insert poor coporate decisions here)”

How is a failed switch a poor corporate decision?    Did they know it was going to fail but they CHOSE not to fix it? 

hmm well there are a lot os possibilities there. The most obvious would be to have backups to the backups of the backups. They obviously didn’t have those or a outage this massive wouldn’t have happened in the first place. Years ago they could have upgraded their servers or whatever to negate any possibility of an outtage happening period. But they didn’t and it did. They have made poor product placement decisions, poor OS upgrades path decisions, poor hardware upgrade decisions. This goes on and on, and as it does they continue to lose the loyal following they’ve had since god knows when. I’ll admit I had a few blackberries and while nice devices they just do not have any advantage over the competition anymore. They are getting left behind and instances like this do not help. Declining userbase, declining marketshare, and a declining reputation all add up to a slow and painful death. RIM has indeed contracted the phage, and it will eat them alive until they learn to truly innovate – which will not happen.

Thanks banana. To Mr Applesucks…. A failing switch is not a bad corporate decision. I dare say it is something that happens all the time in many companies.  A failed corporate switch leading to a failure that wipes out upwards of 30 million users for 3 – 4 days shows a complete systemic failure at the heart of the company.  Can you not understand that? Ask any corporate IT department who’s top execs were left stranded for 4 days…….

Any and every CIO that uses that service should be asking RIM some pretty searching questions.

BGR isn’t reporting anything new here: these negative stories started coming from BB users – who’ve been loyal for years. There’s no vendetta. 

As a Blackberry user for 4 years and administrator of our company’s BES, RIM deserves all the sh*t they’re getting. We’ve decided to sunset our BES, and instead upgrade our Exchange and switch to iPhones and Windows Phones (employees can choose). The Blackberry model was revolutionary years ago but now it’s frustrating, unreliable, the devices and experience pathetic and archaic.

I agree the news is what it is…  my point is that BGR puts up negative RIM news the second it comes out.. but waits to post positive news about RIM (although there hasn’t been much lately) for 2, 3, or 4 days after it happens (if they even post it at all).

Applesucksfatties: I think an outage going into its third day and spreading to users on 4 continents is news. While negative, these stories weren’t opinion pieces: they were covering a huge problem affecting millions of users.

 You are missing my point though.. .they are right there posting the ‘negative’ about RIM… but certainly don’t do them any favors on with the ‘postive’ news.

You keep forgetting this blog, and other blogs are businesses. They are ran to make money off advertising, etc.

Look at how many comments are generated in negative posts, vs positive ones.

Business is Business. No one is here to sugarcoat things or to fluff up RIM for their own mistakes.

Maybe you need to get a hobby then..    

you mean like fixing blackberries?

@bananatroll:disqus – or like pulling that Bionic out of your arse..   

Fair comment. BP was worse.

But RIM’s performance this week has been catastrophic. Both from a technology standpoint (wouldn’t want to be the person responsible for service in EMEA)  and as ever PR. They didn’t even admit they had a problem for hours. Pathetic. Surely you can’t disagree with that? Or do you think they did a good job for you, their customer? I’m a customer and I feel badly let down. 

1st point, BlackBerry is RIM’s only brand, they even name their tablets that, they don’t do anything else. Fair enough if it was called SONY VAIO or something, but BlackBerry and RIM are synonyms, they mean exactly the same thing.

It’s not dead yet, but they aren’t getting any more popular, and in general it still costs them largely the same for them to support 70,000,000 users as 1,000,000, either way you still need a massive amount of “core” backend equipment. If they lose users, they could easily become unprofitable, and well, not have a great future then

Their BB user base is growing quarter over quarter as their geographic reach expands.. and the overall smartphone market gets larger. 

Ps. And yes, BlackBerry and RIM are pretty much synonymous.. but you still are talking about RIM’s financial statements.. not BlackBerry’s. 

In the same way that Palm was working fine, but then they went bust. It’s not about anything but profit, and the fact is they’re nowhere near as profitable as they really should be in comparison to other manufacturers. HTC for example is way newer than RIM, but they are having a lot more success over here.

Your statement is only partially correct.  Yes, their margins are getting squeezed…but they still have an operating profit margin of almost 20%…. and there really aren’t any other players in the industry that you can compare straight apples to apples (no pun intended).  Apple’s is about 30%.. but they also have PC business and are really deep in the tablet and personal music player markets as wells (so it isn’t a straight smartphone to smartphone comparison).    On a side note…Nokia’s is a shade below 4%..

Go look at RIM’s stock. They’ve been plummeting, and this episode hasn’t helped. Oh, and they’ve failed to innovate at all over the past four years.

My point is that RIM is making money from operations and has a surplus of cash on their balance sheet with no long term debt.   As long as they continue invest capital wisely and not lose money on their operations, there is virtually no way they can go under.  

Is appleplesucksfatties is RIM’s primary internet defender? He’s all over every comment on here.

I hear the head from Lazaridis must be pretty good.

As always correct again.  They do have a lot of cash still. The reason the stock has been decimated is because the market looks forward. What they can see is some good stuff but some things that are a huge red flag to any analyst…..

-  The cash situation has suffered a huge reversal from cash growth to cash burn
-  Volumes are still there but profit margins dropping through the floor
-  An apparent race to the bottom… plastic Curves to India
-  Brand erosion, yes BlackBerry used to occupy the slot Apple now owns. Now it sells on “cheap”
-  Poor management
-  Last but not least a disturbing increase in quality related “issues”

The stock price undervalues the company today for sure. But what analysts fear is that there is a realistic chance that this company could do a MySpace and go from hero to zero rather than just gradually decline.