RIM Outages

Today’s service outages from RIM did not cause me any issues as I’ve been sitting at my computer all day trying to write. It did bring to mind though, similar issues that customers of ours had at Synamics. We built mass calling platforms for telcos and the expected level of service from us was referred to as 5 nines reliability. 5 nines meant that our systems (along with every other in-network telecom system) had to be available 99.999% of the time. Clearly RIM is not achieving those levels of reliability as 5 nines reliability means that you are allowed to be out of service something like 5 minutes per year. It will be interesting in the days ahead to see if this service outage is material to RIM’s customers. If they start leaving in droves it will be because this was a material problem. If such is the case then RIM has forsaken what is material in their business for something that is immaterial such as creating new tablets. Apple has been great at figuring out what is material. Now let’s see if Rim can be just as great.