10 Things That Went Wrong For BlackBerry

"The worldwide BlackBerry outage that has plagued Research In Motion this week has left millions of subscribers in dozens of countries without access to e-mail and other messaging services for days. And the outage, which is likely one of the biggest in RIM's history, could tempt some of the BlackBerry faithful to ditch their "crackberries" for competing products form Apple and Google." -- CNET

"And the crash was summed up in a joke doing the rounds on the same website: ‘What did one BBM user say to the other? Nothing.'" -- Daily Mail

"Their time as builders is over," said Vic Alboini, Jaguar's chairman and chief executive. "Management has failed to appreciate RIM's competitive environment, which largely explains RIM's declining market presence and dramatically reduced share price. RIM has become a reactionary company trying to compete in an innovative industry." -- Guardian

"There's no such thing as a good time for RIM to leave half its customers without messaging or internet. But the problem's been getting worse, not better—on the day that Apple makes its strongest case for total dominance." -- Gizmodo

"RIM, the maker of BlackBerry, was absolutely destroyed yesterday in the stock market. But that's just part of the story. RIM is screwed. " -- Gizmodo

"The eyes of the world turned to Slough yesterday when it emerged as the epicentre of the three-day BlackBerry meltdown.
A computer crash at the smartphone firm's data centre in the Berkshire town has left millions of users across the globe unable to access email or internet services, or the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) system." -- Daily mail

Angry British entrepreneur Lord Sugar who set up electronics firm Amstrad in 1968, tweeted: "In all my years in IT biz, I have never seen such an outage as experienced by BlackBerry. I can't understand why it's taking so long to fix." -- The Sun

"The BlackBerry initially found favour because of its secure, encrypted "push" email facility; essentially, RIM takes care of handling emails and delivers them to your handset as soon as they are sent, relieving you of the burden of repeatedly pressing "check mail". But this has made RIM a crucial link in the chain; if its service fails, you won't get your email – regardless of your internet connectivity. It's the same with BBM: the millions of messages teenagers fire off daily are all routed through RIM's data centres, and their delivery is entirely at their mercy. " -- The Independent

"Blackberry has had an annus horribilis. Scratch that. It's had several anni horribili. If Blackberry stood for anything, it was reliability. Its complex multinational server system was more-or-less impossible for the layman to understand. But the upshot was, it always worked. Blackberry was Volvo. Chunky, a little uncool, but you could drop a piano on one and it would keep on trucking. Now that image is looking tarnished and there is one less reason for fickle customers to stick around. Android, iPhone and Windows Phone are all lurking, seductively." -- BBC

"When RIM's architecture works, it's a huge competitive advantage," said Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. "But when it fails, it's a millstone around RIM's neck." --CNET