BlackBerry service went down across North America for the better part of a day this month, and the reaction told you more about the product than any review could. People did not complain that their phone was broken. They complained that their email had stopped, everywhere, at once, for everyone they work with.
That is not how a telephone fails. It is how a service fails, and it happened because RIM’s product was never really the handset.
Almost nobody outside the industry knows how a BlackBerry actually gets mail. It does not connect to your company’s mail server the way a laptop does. Messages leave your employer’s building, travel to a facility RIM operates, get compressed and encrypted there, and are then pushed out to the device over the carrier’s network. Every message, from every BlackBerry, in the region, passes through infrastructure belonging to a company in Waterloo.
When it works, and it almost always works, the result is remarkable. Mail arrives without being asked for. The battery lasts for days because the device is not constantly polling. Data charges stay low because the payload is compressed before it ever touches the air. None of that is achievable if each handset talks to each mail server independently, which is why competitors offering push email keep producing something that drains the battery by lunchtime.
The centralisation is the engineering achievement and the strategic exposure, and they are the same fact.
What strikes me is who is comfortable with this. Corporate IT departments, who would refuse point blank to route internal mail through a third party under any other circumstance, accept it here without much argument, because what they get in return is control. Remote wipe. Policy enforcement. A device that can be switched off from a console when somebody leaves. RIM sells surveillance and administration to the people signing the cheque, and the person carrying the thing is not the customer.
Which is a strong position while email is a work activity performed on equipment your employer chose.
It is a much weaker one if mail becomes something every phone does adequately, bought by the person carrying it, for their own reasons. Then the advantage stops being push email and starts being the administrative console, and administrative consoles do not create the kind of attachment that keeps a product alive when the thing in the pocket has become a matter of personal taste.
Nothing in the market suggests that shift is imminent. But an outage is a useful reminder of where the value sits, and it does not sit in the keyboard.