Been on the fence about getting an iPhone, what with it now available on two networks that don’t wildly suck? Research In Motion would like to help you along with that decision by committing what appears to be the corporate version of hara-kiri.
As the few remaining consumers who own a BlackBerry are well aware, service in the Americas died yesterday, thus joining the rest of the world and actually popping up on tech blog radars, because finally more than five people were affected. Oh, and it also hit their core business, namely business customers, too, although not nearly as badly.
RIM blames a defective switch in their network, which must be the Internet Kill Switch or something because, seriously, guys, the entire world? This is especially bad because RIM would really, really like to compete in the consumer market, against the iPhone, someday, and to do that, they need not to have worldwide network outages. Obviously.
This morning the company posted an apology from RIM Founder and Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis on YouTube…
The short version: We’re sorry. Very sorry. Now please don’t do something prudent like buying an iPhone!