Frank Hayes of ComputerWorld.com asks exactly this question. After the outage last week many users (including myself) were grumbling about the lack of reliability. Frank opened my eyes to the other side of the coin:
The analysis is simple: The BlackBerry works, mostly. It’s cheap, functional and — most of the time — reliable.
Three hours down out of 7,000 since last April? That’s 99.95% reliability. Want more nines? You’ll have to pay more. Probably a lot more.
That’s because most users don’t need all those nines. They can survive a few hours without e-mail arriving in their pockets. Before the CrackBerry, they did it all the time.
So only a small fraction of BlackBerry users would ante up for service with much higher reliability. That would likely make the cost per user stratospheric.
Cheap, functional, reliable. You get to pick two — at most.
If you are interested in this kind of stuff I would recommend reading this well written article at this link. It might just open your eyes. 
Luciano ( View Profile) Moderator - Posts: 448
Posted: February 18, 2008 at 1:29 PM EST
Here is a more thorough and interesting explanation: http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature0267.htm
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But maybe RIM needs to read this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/01/22.html
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I’ve posted this before, but it is relevant again.
Damian Not Registered
Posted: February 18, 2008 at 11:51 PM EST
I’ll answer the question… Yes.
Anyone that can not, needs to re-evaluate their lives/work habits. If you need better than 99.95% uptime, you need a backup plan, that’s just plain business 101. Look out for yourself, don’t blame someone else for your failure to cover your own ass. We are hinging so much of our lives on these electronic mediums that can be utterly destroyed with the smallest of gliches, who’s to blame the destroyer or us for relying on them.
Ronen Halevy ( View Profile) Senior admin - Posts: 5298
Posted: February 18, 2008 at 11:54 PM EST
Damian,
I agree. But I get pissed when the outages always happen when I really need my Berry. Such as this time when I was stuck out in the middle of nowhere without GPS.
Luciano ES ( View Profile) Moderator - Posts: 448
Posted: February 19, 2008 at 10:23 AM EST
That’ not the point, Damian. The point is that we’re a bunch of addicts and go into withdrawal when Berrynet goes out.