Ask Yourself – Is 99.95% Reliability Enough?

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.