A spokeswoman for the company said in an e-mail message that no one was available for comment.

Eric Miller, an e-commerce consultant in Philadelphia, said he had spent three hours trying to “debug” his wife’s BlackBerry on Tuesday night. He learned of the network problem on Wednesday morning.

“As a consultant, my time is money, and those three hours could have bought her a new iPhone and plan,” Mr. Miller wrote in an e-mail message.”

Pretty lame of RIM not to bother commenting to the NEW YORK TIMES, and the Miller guy is right – time IS money. The less time spent futzing with things you can’t fix, the better.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/technology/companies/24blackberry.html?_r=1&nl=technology&emc=techupdateema1

As a fellow server admin and someone who manages a few thousand mobile devices from all the major platforms on the enterprise side, I’ll just have to say that the TWO major outages impacting end users as well as fellow consumers was an issue. So much so, that all major wireless carriers and major corporations who do utilize RIM in their own messaging infrastructures were issued with the ticket info noted in the post.

Yes, buyer beware …5 of 9s, etc. At the end of the day does that mean a service outage shouldn’t be “news” …I don’t know. I tend to aire on the side that it does, indeed, have a baring. Maybe I’m biased, but since none of the people carrying iPhones, WinMo, Symbian, or anything else were having issues then — just maybe — it bares mentioning.

You know, mentioning, again, that the architecture employed by the RIM solution (you know, after failing *twice* in seven days for..again…almost every single user across the board for all BES/BIS services — except, evidently, for a handful of people that are completely irritated that the outage is even being mentioned may need to be addressed by RIM in order to remain competitive with the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.

It wasn’t just executies or companies impacted, it was all major BlackBerry services across, at least, North America for all users. Some evidently didn’t notice. I wouldn’t really expect them to spend a great deal of time on this post or continue to argue its merits when the ordeal is widely documented and available via news outlets and multiple other tech sites.

My humble two cents.

If there was an issue with Google, Twitter, or any other service going down I would expect it to be addressed and covered. Would it matter if I or a few other people didn’t notice the disruption in service? No.

Here’s the deal: If I purchase a product or pay for a service, I expect it to function. Call me crazy. Sometimes the carriers don’t have the best networks, and sometimes those carriers have legitimate network outages due to equipment failure or many other reasons. In this scenario, what is being pointed out, is that RIM — unlike other smartphone providers — has a specific messaging infrastructure whereby the traffic goes through their NOC. That’s usually touted along with the encryption and security (why more than just a few government agencies and businesses implement BES/BlackBerry architecture + handheld solution). In this case, the point is that NOC is also a single point of failure. Two massive outages in 7 days….again, call me crazy, but that — in my most humble opinion — is worthy of a post.

Honestly, if I “just got” a BlackBerry to use I would be interested in this issue — even if I didn’t notice it. I’m just not following why the post has gotten so much fervor over whether it matters to the average Joe or Jane. The fact is, the outage still impacted thousands upon thousands of users — regardless of whether they’re so called “crackberry” addicts who rely on the push email too much. That’s irrelevant. Fact is a major service outage — no, TWO major service outages — occured in seven days’ time and the excuse was that it was because of a messenger update server side (not the installation done by the customer on their device) just happened to bring down an entire messaging infrastructure for 10 hours.

Not something that affected just a few folks. I suppose I should have included the links to 50 or so other sites that had similar posts. But I didn’t. Mea Culpa.

Again not disputing that SOMEONE didn’t notice. I am sure there were plenty of people did. However, there’s a contingent of people who are just getting BlackBerries that just won’t care about this kind of an outage.

One thing is for certain about all of the carriers, RIM, ISP’s and web site developers is that you can no longer plan for only part of your community to actually use their services. If you plan your network and services as close to maximum as you can, outages due to load can be greatly reduced. You got to do the site/network/service test just like plumbers flush all of the toilets at new stadiums at the same time to make sure the building’s plumbing system doesn’t fail. Not doing so will cause growing pains as soon as users discover your service. I think this is why Google is such a fan of the limited beta. Get your service out there, create buzz with the limiting and while the limit is still in place, build the service up.

Not disputing one didn’t happen. I just wonder what a few hours of an outage really DOES to people. Does it cause a real loss of money? Just askin…

Also, come to think of it, if I look at the time period stated, my wife DID get e-mail in this time on her phone because it was driving me crazy.