The Cause for RIM Going Down is a Software Failure

RIM has finally published a press release explaining why their entire network went down this week.

It turns out that it was a software failure, not a hardware failure. As our phone technology is more and more software based (IP Phones, Skype, Blackberries, IPhone, etc.) the risk of these types of failures either at the client level (your phone crasehs) or at the network level (the network fails) is going to increase dramatically.

Ordinary old-school phones have amazing uptime because they're almost 100% hardware based - the software in them is almost non-existent. The technology also hasn't changed in about a hundred years.

But with the evolution of phones, you'll start to see that reliability go down even as the dependency on our phones as they become mobile data appliances goes up.

I'm not sure this is such a great thing, but your car, your television, and soon your appliances are all on the same trajectory. Your car is already there - the number of "computers" in the average car is growing every year and the more luxurious the car, the more micro-processors are controlling the driving experience.

I had a problem with my car where the on-board sensor (e.g. micro-processor) was failing to regulate the amount of fuel going into the engine. The car worked fine but the engine light would come because the sensor couldn't see that it was working. Cost of repair was $1100!