Blackberry CEOs – yes that’s plural (you would think that two would be better than one) – are looking to control the damage from recent worldwide outages. Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie apologized for the system wide failure that left millions of BlackBerry users without instant messaging, email and web browsing and said the company would work to regain their customers trust. “Our inability to quickly fix this has been frustrating,” Lazaridis said, sounding contrite. “We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to minimize risk of this happening again.”
Even before this outage, critics has said that the company has let itself fall to far beind rivals Apple, Android (Google) and with the release of Mango, a momentum gaining Microsoft. Skeptics believe that it may be out of reach and touch and there may not be a place for it at the top of the heap any longer with such strong rivals.
Supportors of Blackberry have long defended the companies excellence in it’s messaging functionality. With the release of Apples’ iOS 5 and it’s new iMessaging software. Blackberry and standard text messaging (SMS) services in general will be challenged in the coming months as iMessage and other advanced messaging options get more attention.
Don’t count RIM out just yet, but it is time for something bold if they wish to even be part of the equation in coming years.
