There’s been some muttering that RIM knew about the blackout last week a solid two hours before it hit. A few folks reckon that BlackBerry users should have been able to get a heads up on the outage, but that might not be the case. Now, I’m no technician (they keep me around BBCool for my good looks and charm), but how easy do you guys think it is to determine that there’s nothing you can do in a case like that? If a doctor has two hours to save a patient’s life, would you rather he spend that time fighting a possibly avoidable death, or use it trying to figure out how to tell the family? There’s no doubt that behind RIM’s cool, tight-lipped PR façade was a gaggle of headless chickens trying figure out what the hell went wrong, and I’d way rather they do that than focus on spin-doctoring, trying to cover the company’s ass for the screw-up.
Of course, I’m not saying that a warning of some service interruptions wouldn’t have been appreciated. Even if it was just before the crash happened, anything would have stopped a lot of customers from harassing tech support about something AT&T et al. couldn’t fix. But outside of telling people what they would have figured out eventually anyway, how much difference would early warning have really made? Post a comment and let us know what you think.
