Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

Michael Mace is hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists this week and rightly features an incendiary post by Daniel Taylor about RIM's peculiar handling of the BlackBerry service outage. It's hard to argue with Dan's logic as he examines the possible reasons why RIM chose not to make any official statement or press release to explain what happened. None of the reasons could be good. Even the rumored explanation that the media attributed to an unnamed source at RIM smells very fishy. If they really expect us to believe that they were performing a software update in the middle of a work week (not during weekend slack) and that this was the cause of the outage, then a spokesperson should have been perfectly fine with stating this to be the case. Instead, no identifiable person at RIM has gone on record with an official explanation.

Dan suggests that RIM's official silence most likely means that they believed the truth to be too bad to report and an official lie too big of a risk. I wouldn't completely rule out incompetent PR-handling—I've seen a lot of companies avoid saying anything about some small bad news, believing that an official response will only make things worse, only to see the silence feed speculation that spins the issue into something much worse than it was. ACCESS is about to face a similar backlash once the press realizes that their statement in February about having released an SDK to developers was a "white lie." Over two months have passed and there still has been no release. A delay of a few months in releasing tools for developing software on devices that haven't entered the market yet is not a big deal. But pretending like no one is paying attention so nothing needs to be said is a huge deal. Why companies do these things to themselves I don't understand, but it's surprisingly common.

Getting back to RIM, you have to wonder what they were thinking with the thing they did manage to announce this week: the BlackBerry VM is being ported to Windows Mobile 6. Does RIM really think that it's BlackBerry's client software that is driving companies to get on the service? Or the paltry selection of mostly-crappy applications? Or that whatever experience their software does deliver is reproduceable on just any old WinMo hardware? Who is the customer for this software? Looks to me like it would be companies that are moving away from BlackBerry toward Windows Mobile devices! So you want to pave a smooth migration path to your toughest competitor? Fabrizio Capobianco (who I grant you has a dog in this fight) suggests that the carriers may actually be the ones that are pushing RIM to do this. Seems a bit far-fetched, but I don't have a better explanation. It's the craziest move I've seen from RIM in, what? ...a whole week!