October | 2011 | My Conflicted Self

Why I Refuse To Buy a Blackberry

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Yesterday (10 October 2011), millions of Blackberry users (tens of millions according to The Guardian) suffered service outages on their Blackberry devices due to server issues at the Slough data centre in the UK. It finally came back up in the early hours of this morning (11 October 2011), but a little earlier many reports of yet more outages, or sluggish connectivity were being talked about on the various forms of social media.

In the US they have been losing the battle for a while now against Android and iPhone. The EMEA region, which the outages affected have been the one area where Research In Motion (the company that develops Blackberry), has been reporting a success in building up it user base.

A quick look at RIM’s share prices shows that share prices have dropped by almost 60% since the beginning of the year (4 January – 10 October 2011). Not exactly making people confident now are they? If you believe the Guardian’s source:

RIM has been ignoring problems with its server architecture that could prove its downfall for years. “They didn’t start looking at scalability until about 2007, when they had around 8m active devices,” the former employee said: “The attitude was, ‘We’re going to grow and grow but making sure our infrastructure can support it isn’t a priority.’ They have their own clunky infrastructure to do something that you don’t really need a clunky infrastructure to do anymore.”

Thanks, but I’ll stick to my Android. According to Gartner, for quarter 2 of 2011, Android devices had just over 43% of the mobile OS market worldwide (compared to 17% for quarter 2 last year). iOS, the OS for iPhones and iPads, were the only other OS to show any significant growth – 18%, up from 14% the previous year. Blackberry dropped from over 18% to under 12%.

I can see this dropping even more after the last two days…