Disruptive Telephony

If you are a Blackberry user (I am), you probably discovered sometime early this morning that you were not receiving email messages... and then you no doubt learned that pretty much all Blackberries in the entire Western hemisphere were offline since last night. For email, that is... they still worked as a phone, but I mean, you don't really get a Blackberry for the phone aspect. At this point, basically every major news outlet is covering the story, and I'm sure we can expect the stories to continue for quite some time.   The service seems to be back up now (mine is, anyway), but I'm sure it will take a bit for it to be restored everywhere.

Working in my home office today, I actually didn't notice the outage until I did one of my very occasional scans of Twitter and saw Chris Brogan complaining being stuck on a train without email access.   Knowing Chris, I figured I'd give him a quick call and was rewarded with this great quote about his trip around New York:

"Yeah, I was just in Penn Station and there were all these dudes in suits looking down at their hands and getting increasingly frantic!"  (Chris Brogan)

Indeed!  Given how much the financial industry (as well as the US government!) relies on Blackberries, I'm sure there were a heck of a lot of frantic calls being made all morning.

As a network technology geek, I'll be curious to see what information comes out later about the cause.  ComputerWorld is running speculation that it may have had to do with issues with one of RIM's Network Operations Centers (NOCs), but that is, at the moment, purely speculation and may be a red herring.  (Although it does raise another issue of why RIM has two NOCs that are both located in Canada.  With a global service such that they have, I would have thought that they would have gone for greater geographic distribution!)

In any event, something like this will definitely serve to remind people of how addicted they are to "push e-mail" and will undoubtedly cause larger customers to ask RIM serious questions about network availability (and perhaps to consider other alternatives).  Having some friends working at RIM (with whom I have not touched base), I can only hope they get it all sorted out rather soon.

That's the question that both Alec Saunders and Ars Technica ask in regard to a news release out of "Digital Life America" entitled "BlackBerry Backlash? Americans Split on 'Always On' Culture" (PDF).   The release, timed to coincide with the 3GSM event in Barcelona last week, covers some of the group's research and includes this:

• 33% agreed with the statement “devices like BlackBerry chain you to work more than they liberate you.” 34% were neutral and the balance, 34%, disagreed.
• Surprisingly, among those who own a BlackBerry or a similar device, the results were not all that different: 34% agreed with the statement, 37% disagreed and 29% were neutral.

The news release went on to highlight other stats that BlackBerry owners do in fact work longer hours and have higher incomes... but both of these are kind of "duh!" statements to me.  Look at who are typically the ones with BB devices in any company (i.e. management, executives).  When was the last time any of us in those job roles (at most North American companies) worked a 40-hour week?  (I think I actually might have in January, but that was because we had a vacation day.)

As a BlackBerry user, I have to say that I'm in the 37% who disagree with the statement, i.e. for me the device is a tremendous liberating device.  That wasn't my initial thought.  I resisted requesting one for a couple of years when peers were doing so.  I watched some folks get into BB-driven email wars at 10pm on a Saturday night and just said "Don't those folks have a life?"  and "Why would anyone want to be that accessible?"

However, once I started using it, I rapidly flipped the other way. For me, it allows me to be connected wherever I want to - should I choose to do so! And I think that's really the key. As Mark Evans writes, it really is about how you use it and how to achieve that work/life balance.  For me, the primary reason I got a BB was for travelling where it has proved to be incredibly useful.  I can't even begin to count the number of airports I've been stuck in where having ready access to email was useful and in some cases necessary. 

Even locally, there are too many times to count when it proved to be useful.  I was driving home one morning from dropping our daughter off at school and thinking about the things I had to do as the morning got underway when one of the warning lights on our car went on.  Since I was about to go by the car dealership, I pulled in and had them check it out.  I just went to the waiting area and used the BB to work through email.  It gave me the freedom to do something like that.  And that freedom does indeed help with my own work/life balance...   but you do need to exercise that restraint and not let it interfere with non-work time. 

At the end of the day, the BlackBerry and other devices are tools that can be either liberating or enslaving.  It's all really in how you choose to use them.  (Or, I suppose, are required to use them... I could see some managers out there expecting/requiring employees to always be available.)

P.S. Sometime, though, I'll write the counterpoint argument about how absolutely annoying it is as a presenter when you have a room full of people surreptitiously (or not) sucked into their email...

Wow!  Some big changes down in Alabama... per the news release yesterday (hat tip to Alec Saunders), Mark Spencer is changing roles within Digium and stepping aside as CEO to bring in ADTRAN's Danny Windham as the new CEO.  Mark will remain as Chairman and CTO of Digium.  They also announced a new worldwide VP of Sales.  Tom Keating has a good writeup of the announcement and also has a link to a podcast of the conference call announcing the changes.  It makes for good listening.

As noted, ADTRAN has had a long relationship with Digium... if I recall correctly, Mark started out as an intern there at ADTRAN and when he went on to launch Linux Support Services and needed a phone system, it was his background at ADTRAN that made him think that if he could just get telephony onto a PC, he could manipulate it.  Thus was born Asterisk.  (And then later Digium, the company, to support Asterisk.)

I'm glad for Mark to see the change.  I've come to know him a bit over the years through conferences/trade shows and the interviews we've done with him for Blue Box...  and he's definitely a hard-core techie and developer... he's done the CEO role because it's needed to be done, but his talents really are in the technology and I'm sure this role change will let him get more back into the technical stuff that is his passion.  Congrats, Mark!  You've certainly deserved it and I do wish you all the best.

I've long enjoyed Richard Zhao's posts at "Telecom, Security and P2P" because, living in Beijing and working for Lenovo, he brings a distinctly different view into the global conversation.  For instance, earlier this year he posted about Chinese security standards, something that few of us outside the country would probably have noticed or commented on.  However, as he mentions over on his Chinese language blog (in English), access to Wordpress.com, where he previously had the blog, is apparently being blocked or degraded in China.  So he has now moved his blog to:

http://sbin.cn/blog/

As the title states, he covers primarily telecom and security.  Do check him out...