Blackberry makes billions from communication. Why can't it communicate with its own customers?

BlackBerry users have been baffled by the idea that whole continents could rely on one building in Slough for their email and instant-messaging. But the ‘data centre’ where BlackBerry’s current disaster began is the Achilles heel of every internet company – huge, air-conditioned vaults, often underground, containing blinking server racks.

From the inside, they always seem terrifyingly vulnerable. Single cupboard-sized racks can contain whole companies – and a building can contain the financial future of an internet giant such as BlackBerry.
What has happened to BlackBerry is a stark reminder for providers of hi-tech services that the world of bricks and mortar can intrude on the world of bits and bytes – and that old-world virtues such as communicating with one’s customers are still paramount, even in the impersonal age of always-on email that BlackBerry itself helped to create.

BlackBerry’s mistakes in this regard have turned a simple, forgivable glitch into a disaster that has financial sharks circling the company – and even some of its own stockholders calling for a ‘break up’ or ‘shake up’  within parent company Research in Motion.
Data centres do collapse. Microsoft’s online ‘cloud’ services went offline for hours this year after an electrical transformer near their Dublin data centre was struck by lightning. But Microsoft handled the disaster by talking constantly on the company Twitter feed. The internet giant even answered questions from individual users.

BlackBerry has taken the silent approach – updates to the company’s Twitter accounts have been once a day, if that, and usually wrong. It’s a haughtiness born of the age when internet companies often no longer even have phone numbers. And it’s not an attitude the public seem minded to forgive.

At midday today, amid growing public anger, the British Blackberry Twitter feed still contained a self-congratulatory message from the previous night saying that the issues had been fixed. The silence has been so pervasive that some UK users learned of BlackBerry’s problem from their phone company, rather than from BlackBerry themselves.

Internet users do forgive. Every internet company worth its salt has seen its services go down – even giants such as Microsoft and Google. But this week

Blackberry, a company already flailing about for purpose in the face of rivals such as Apple, has shown just how out-of-touch it is.
Even a tiny amount of communication would have been enough. But we’ve had almost nothing. And the timing could not be worse for the company, facing

Apple’s new iPhone this Friday. It’s conceivable that this single error could tarnish the brand for good.
It’s a lesson: if you are going to make billions from communication, you cannot afford to be above communicating yourself.

12/10/2011 - Dailymail
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