Why Blackberry Needs A Fundamental Infrastructure Change, or It WILL Fail

February 13, 2008 by Dan in Geeky with 9 Comments

Full disclosure before you read any further, I hold nominal RIMM stock.

Blackberries are and have been the words most popular selling smartphone (with Windows Mobile and Apple slowly chewing away at it’s lead) but these always connected email delivering devices have a critical design flaw. All email that is sent to your Blackberry, regardless if you are a home or enterprise user, flows through RIM’s (The developer of Blackberry) servers, creating a large single point of failure in the devices dataflow.

As we witnessed on Monday, when RIM has a software malfunction on their servers email is disrupted for all users. Why RIM chose the approach to have all email flow through a centralized location is beyond me. There are far better ways to deliver PUSH email and even offer wireless contact and calendar syncing that is not dependent on a off network untrusted computer cluster.

First there is IMAP. Starting in 2003 I had a Treo 600 I used a program called “Chatter Mail” (Now owned by Palm) to deliver PUSH email to my device. Most email providers that provide IMAP offer the “Idle” command which enable the push functionality on you IMAP client. One step better is in all recent Microsoft handhelds (Even PalmOS handhelds) Microsoft introduced a “Direct Push” technology that not only instantly delivers your email to your handheld when it arrives but also syncs your contacts and calendars wirelessly via strong encryption to your Exchange server – which DOMINATES the corporate world. (As a side note, I run an Exchange server and find the functionality – Especially with 2007 – to be far superior then any other email server offering).

Yes, Blackberries are wonderfully designed devices and do what they do really well but having email flow through one central location for all users is a critical design flaw and if RIM continues to experience the rapid growth it is experiencing these outages will become far more common.

I also am very critical of RIM for not reacting as quick as they should of to inform the public about the outage (It took them 45 minutes) and blame the issue on a “software upgrade” which was the same exact reason for the outage last April. The conspiracy theorist in me feels that the RIM servers are having a hard time coping with the exponential growth they are experiencing, but that is purely speculation and opinion. Also, I’m kinda glad Palm took a moment to explore the issue and officially call RIM out on the error in their network construction.

Do you agree that RIM’s network infrastructure and data delivery model is flawed, or do you feel having the central control that they have is essential to deliver a high quality solution. What handheld do you carry? Do you carry a handheld? Who do you use for your email? Take it up in the comments.

G . H I S C O T T

I don’t understand why people like blackberry. You can do all the same stuff with Treo or Windows Mobile.

I don’t get it. Somehow, they marketed themselves into the leading PDA product despite their IP problems and despite this horrific network architecture.

I am shaking my head.
http://www.slackitude.com Jason

Software upgrade? In the middle of a business day? No way. There’s a reason you do upgrades during off-peak hours.
Ian

Maybe they’re just too embarrassed to say “Earl tripped over the power cord.”

Or worse yet, “Earl got mad and burned down the server room.”
Xavier

I use a Treo 750 and a mailbox on a Zimbra 5 hosting, and it’s a great solution compared to BlackBerries used by some friends.

The only problem is the quantity of data transferred during the Zimbra (or Exchange) ActiveSync permanent connection: About 1mb per day on Sundays, with just 1 or 2 small text emails!

Here in Mexico, if you don’t have an unlimited (or convenient) data plan, this can be expensive.
chad

@Hiscott

I used to say the same thing…. don’t knock it till you’ve tried it is my only words of advice.

@Dan
45 minutes to announce (to end users no less) an issue with an App and server cluster that large is actually fairly impressive all things considered.
http://www.uneasysilence.com Dan

Chad – It was 45 minutes to large volume customers (of which my email provider is one).

End users found out on the news

_d
Mike D

@hiscott

Because blackberry doesn’t crash (the os not rims servers obviously) because it does what it says it does and it doesn’t break.

@ Dan

I understand that people say its rediculous that they have a centralized infrastructure but I doubt they do it for no reason, I am not one to question methods just because something on the surface seems to be going wrong with it and there’s no ‘apparent’ reason for it to continue
antiblackberry

Goodbye blackberry….bwa hahahahaha!
Jeff Anderson

Reasons why people use a Blackberry from some one who has an old Treo 650 in my desk drawer, a Nokia N800 and has sold his Win Mobile devices on ebay.

1) It’s a TANK – drop the blackberry – go ahead – it laughs at your bad coordination – The rest of the devices are much easier to damage – Heck the Treo flys into at least 5 pieces (device, stylus, battery, battery cover, sd card) and the Nokia no longer has a stylus because it was lost during just such a drop.

2) It has a good battery life – all of the devices peter out much faster than the balckberry
3) It doesn’t reboot – no really – if you don’t have a blackberry – take our word for it – it doesn’t ever reboot – you have to work really hard to get it to crash.
4) Simple to manage – on most of the other devices you have to worry about the data – how to sync it, how to get data onto the memory card, how to protect the data once it is on the memory card – etc. (depending on how the corporate infrastructure is set up, but…) On my corporate setup – if I completely screw the device up (run over it with a car or flush it or something) all I have to do to get my mail back is get a new one and turn it on (not really this easy – but much easier than the other devices)

OK – I am sure that I could write more – but there are my reasons – top of mind

Why Blackberry Needs A Fundamental Infrastructure Change, or It WILL Fail

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