Slashdot Mirror
Is RIM's Centralized Network Model Broken?
wiredmikey writes "Is RIM's centralized network model broken? Andrew Jaquith thinks so, and provides an interesting analysis on why RIM should move to a decentralized model. After two long outages this month, many believe that the end is drawing near for Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry. But is Research In Motion in trouble? Financially, RIM continues to be a healthy company, throwing off billions in profit each year. But if it doesn't 'think different' about its network strategy, its customers may think different about their choice of handset vendor, Jaquith argues. Jaquith says RIM should dismantle its proprietary centralized delivery network, something that has been a key strength for the company. Data plans that provide TCP/IP over wireless carrier networks are now ubiquitous, nullifying a key RIM advantage. Does BlackBerry need to rethink its network model to effectively compete moving forward?"
BlackBerries get free email etc. while roaming (abroad). Who else offers that? For people who travel and email for business, that's still a key advantage.
A lot of carriers in Europe and Australia add a monthly surcharge on BlackBerry contracts. Vodafone Netherlands, for example requires you to pay an extra €5/month if you choose a BlackBerry handset (increasing the price from €23 to €28 per month). There's no similar fee for iPhone or Android users. I'm sure this must be costing RIM more than a few customers.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Given the amount of legacy investment(not just on RIM's part; but on the part of some of their bigger corporate customers) in their proprietary stuff, its relatively good uptime history, and the fact that some people still value its particular set of advantages and disadvantages, it seems insane for RIM to scrap it. Consider, which of the following seems easier and less risky:
1. Scrap proprietary BBM/BIS/etc. and attempt to recreate featureset of the same in midflight with some sort of decentralized setup.
Or:
2. Keep all the various RIM-specific tricks around; and take advantage of the fact that flash is cheap by buying or building an IMAP/Activesync mail client that runs on your handsets(and has a bunch of centralized knobs and switces to keep the BES admins of the world happy). If the customer wants a classic blackberry, turn it off. If they want a decentralized offering, turn it on. If they want both, turn both on.
Centralized computing works fabulously (and inexpensively) if you've got the right infrastructure. Mainframes work.
I think anyone who has ever experienced a blackberry outage and had to explain it to his CEO will have learned how the blackberry chain works and how everything MUST go through their servers creating a global single point of failure.
It's just a bad idea to put all of your eggs in one basket.
Andrew Jaguith must be American, in countries with pay per use data models, RIM has a 3:1 advantage over other platforms, when traveling and paying between $1 and $13 per MB of data the savings drasticly add up.
Beyond data compression, RIM's security model is largely supported by having centralized notds, there is no dns spoofing, this helps RIM obtain FIPS certification that much sooner.
What RIM does need to do is improve redundancy, and centralize per country more so when a single node goes down it doesn't cause as wide spread an issue, I can say I have had more service interuptions from my home internet supplier in 4 years than I have had from RIM, and I spend 100+ nights away from home a year
The trivial and common response to this (and the original post I was going to write) is that it needs to GO because its competitors don't do this and, thus, don't have to worry about losing internet and email service if one cluster of huge servers somewhere in their country goes dark for a bit. Many consumers might have agreed with this school of thought with their wallet and went elsewhere.
The thing to keep in mind, however, is that this centralised model was NEVER meant to "serve" regular home consumer usage patterns. Remember their devices from yesteryear? You know, the business-only, no bullshit phones that would be totally useless for Joe Consumer? That, if anything, showed that their target market was for people who needed really good phone and email device with extra high security, if required. Their centralised model (outages aside) ensures the highest quality for both of these requirements with a battery life that is still unmatched by iOS or Android
The problem is that the market has shown that most people are fine with "good enough," and Blackberry devices are FAR from that. Their Their work phones might still rule with email, but their iPhone or Droid does that and much more satisfactorily enough to meet their needs. It's also cheaper per month and has more "apps." Additionally, they are, slowly but surely, becoming secure enough to be seriously considered for the workplace. Once this happens, Blackberry has no leg to stand on.
I think RIM needs to worry about moving their phones to the 21st century. Outages happen; bad market strategy shouldn't.
There will always be a demand for the Soviet-style centralized IT that RIM's system represents. It's the same old kind of mentality that insists "no personal calls on a business cell phone" or (heaven forbid) browsing the interwebs while on company time.
All the companies I know have either switched away from Blackberry, or at least opened their policies to say "get whatever phone-device you want, here's your budget, and tech-supporting it is your problem". Nobody, given that option, chooses Blackberry.
RIM will continue to be profitable, and actually their service will probably improve as the load on their systems decreases.
-Styopa
RIM as a whole reminds me of a scene from the Simpson's several years back: Principal Skinner is wandering around a boarded up part of Springfield that use to house "wholesome" activities and such and he briefly wonders if he's just out of touch with what's going on. Only to come to the conclusion that no...everyone else is wrong. This is how I see RIM/BB. Smartphones evolved and they're still serving up the same ol' stuff. Great, you're a "corporate" phone. Guess what. That market isn't growing anymore.
Being down for several days in each of two instances in the last month is a bit more than "one hickup(sic)". I don't think the Napster comparison fits, if you're referring to what I think you are, it was because Napster was forced by court order to vacate its existing "business model". Which I really don't recall was actually a business model because they didn't charge anyone anything.
Going forwards, they have to leverage cloudsourced meta resources to enhance avoision of non-functational points of zeta-inflection.
If their in-house IT isn't on board with those pre-bleeding edge concepts, I'd be happy to run a seminar at a 5 star spa of their choice.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
That is the problem with a lot of companies who are first to market. They are ahead of their time and they feel comfortable in that fact so they don't do much to keep innovating, then when time catches up they are stuck with an old technology. What makes it worse, when they do that they have a huge customer base who is resistant to change as they learned the old technology. So any attempts to make improvements will meet with resistance from its user base.
Compared with Apples method. Enter the market Midway take all the lessons learned and mistakes that their competitors made, create a new product using newer technology and market the hell out of it, to make it seem like they invented it first. Forcing all the other adopters to play catch up with them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Every time I log into Gmail, it passes thru google.com.sa for authentication i.e. my password and authentication info are stored on a server with a local address!
The TLD of course doesn't tell you where the server actually is. This is what this domain resolves to:
Now looking up the first address reveals:
So much about that server with local address.
I haven't checked the others, but with the IPs so close to each other I'm pretty sure they are in the same data center.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's bad enough having to manage GroupWare or Exchange, but having to run some horrible RIM BlackBerry enterprise bloatware on them just so BB users can get email is ridiculous.
SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
That's harsh. Just a few months ago, Blackberry's unique social networking features played an important role in facilitating the high profile collaborative activities of many members of the key under-25 demographic!:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug/08/london-riots-facebook-twitter-blackberry
This comment is biased, way biased. I absolutely hate RIM and hope they die a slow and painful death. Their licensing scheme took advantage of us for years and now the cheapest Droid blows them away. After setting up a few Droids and a butt load of Iphones, I will offer to buy my users a smart phone just for the privilege of switching them over. That way I get to personally throw the crappy BB phone down the back stairwell myself. Then I put the BB in a box addressed to RIM HQ with a letter explaining and a video showing me and my techs throwing the damn thing against a cinder block wall.
;)
There, I feel much better now.
PS: we only have one user left on the BES and I simply cannot wait to switch him over and turn that server off. No P to V for that server. More like P to oblivion.
RIM you can KMA, long live the Iphone, long live the Droid.
I haven't checked the others, but with the IPs so close to each other I'm pretty sure they are in the same data center.
...
Google owns their ip blocks. They even got ASN. They can put them anywhere they like, even if the ip's are next to each other. The geo location databases are just made from info given to ARIN / RIPE etc.
Perfect example of someone thinking he knows better. Not that the GP was any of that wiser, but neither was that answer.
Many companies have what appears to be great years right up to the point they go bankrupt. One of the leading indicators they are in trouble is erosion of margin, or their ability to make a healthy profit on each widget (handset) sold. This is happening at RIM. They are in trouble. There is hope. Most companies the size of RIM have enough capital to reinvent themselves. In their case that might mean building a healthy OS, something they have not done yet. It also means being really focused, again something they are absolutely terrible at.
RIM is still making money, and the one big factor that everyone seems to forget - BES. Nobody else even comes close to being able to offer companies the level of fine-grained administrative control over their companies devices as to RIM through BES. I work for a public company and whenever the discussion about phones comes up, one of the first questions is how one is supposed to remotely administer, control, and if needed, wipe the phones. The discussion pretty much starts and stops with BES. I'd love nothing more than to use an iPhone, but what am I going to do, install iTunes on every corporate PC? Have each user individually sign up for a 'find my iphone' account? No. With with an OSX Server (running on Apple's official server hardware - a Mac Mini), iPhone control leaves a lot to be desired.
BES is still a HUGE hook for businesses. I know Apple and Google boast that a lot of fortune 500 companies use iPhones/Androids, but until they can demonstrate their business compatibility (ala not having to install iTunes on every corporate machine, being able to centrally restrict apps, etc), RIM is still going to own a huge chunk of the corporate pie.
And when I say I'd love to be using an iPhone (or Android) - I'm serious. I use a new Bold 9900, and I think it's a POS. It can't even smoothly play the HD video that it recorded, despite it's crystal HD engine or whatever they call it. The browser reminds me of IE5. Hotlinks and the ability to click on them is still a fairly new, radical concept.
RIMs centralized model is probably all that's keeping them alive right now... at least in Canada.
Every provider in Canada offers an atrocious data plan, or a "blackberry plan" (I'm assuming by subsidy from RIM) that you can only use on blackberries. The "blackberry plan" of course comes with free emails, BBM, facebook, and text messages but no "data" (ie. dynamic web browsing).
Not only does this give lower budget users a cheap way to access popular data services but it ties them in to proprietary technologies like BBM where they build networks and become dependent.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
If those IPs were geographically diverse, I would expect a bigger separation between subnets. Splitting one subnet over multiple distant networks would not only be a pain, but make little sense, as it still allows for a single point of failure.
I've just run a traceroute to a selection of those IPs via different continents, and it does seem to suggest those servers are on the same network segment.
> Perfect example of someone thinking he knows better.
Back at'cha!
I laugh until I cry when I see people saying that the blackberry infrastructure is old school, when the big corporations and users are throwing so much money and data at cloud computing.
Blackberry backend is cloud infrastructure in the purest form. The guarantee of the BB Cloud is that It offers a guarantee that your data will get through to the end customer. This is the essense of cloud computing. Yes, when it goes down your data gets held up but this is the same with any cloud infrastructure. In the case of this latest outage, I do not believe there was much if any lost transactions and it simply came down to long delays.
Yes, it is true that RIM can do a much better job at building and scaling their infrastructure to be future ready. Tripple fault tolerance on all infrastructure in any cloud computing is an absolute must and this should be the minimum that all companies adhere to. RIM will need to raise the bar a few more noches to ensure that their cloud maintains the highest possible level of quality of service.
Many argue that BIS and BES is too complex a model and needs to be simplified. This cannot be farther from the truth. In order to make large and complex solutions robust and scalable, you must add complexity by adding extra layers within the infrastructure in order to make it work. Stable, secure and light weight messaging and data transactioning can only be done with a cloud infastructure in between.
The biggest challenge with the blackberry cloud is not its instability but rather that when it fails, many users are affected and thus it is good news to post on blogs. In reality, the BB cloud is likely more stable on average than most other solutions out there for messaging and data transfer from mobile devices. The only reason you do not hear otherwise is that failures are localized and would only affect hundreds of users which does not make for very good news.
- JsD
OK, I just checked out the IPs of google.de:
Do those IP addresses look familiar?
Well, OK, both are in Europe, so let's try google.com:
And google.com.au:
OK, so maybe it's just the local DNS (I don't know how one would get different DNS records from different countries, but then, I'm no DNS expert). Therefore let's try an online resolver:
It gives me:
Ah, indeed, another address! I didn't know that was possible.
But then, my main point still remains: The TLD tells you exactly nothing about where the server is located. Note that all of .com, .com.sa, .de, .com.au ended up at the same servers for my local lookups.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
is that they get key management right. No external CA, everything is in their hands.
Every company or organization who wants to operate something similarly safe can already do it (disable all external CAs on the devices you give to your employees, and roll out your own CA in the correct way). It will cost, probably the same amount it would cost to operate a BB, since the main cost is not the technology or the setup but the logistics to get qualified and reliable employees in a safe organization to distribute the keys onto the employees.
Now if several organizations want their employees to communicate safely on the other hand then its getting a little bit more troublesome, but then a compnay like RIM could provide a mail transport agent between companies which requires some more authentication than usual.
A completely centralized network model that services clients across the entire planet is, by definition, broken.
I think the concept was always broken. It's why I no longer use a Blackberry, even though it's the best integrated device with the best keyboard. Our Enterprise server went down for a week and a half, for reasons I will not go into right now, and by the time it was up again many of us had switched to Android or iOS. BES provides some really great features, when it's running. A single point of failure is fine, until it fails. And then it's not funny anymore.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Who controls the BES? If it was based on an open protocol, everybody could just run their own server. Since its not, you have to either use the BES of your network operator, or buy a product you cannot look into.
Of course the network operators see this as a feature. They want control, and they want to do more than just shuffling around bits. That's why they heavily subsidize everything giving them control over the device. For a long time this meant that devices supporting OpenVPN or VoIP wouldn't be subsidized. Since the majority of phones are bought by operators, the devices are built according to the wishes of the operators.
Well according to Slashdot Everything Microsoft does is evil. .NET isn't an evil business strategy, it is actually a good platform. However Microsoft just Messed it up by leveraging the disadvantages of the two idea. Microsoft Platform Only and Slower Operating speeds do to virtual machine. .NET could have been huge if they made their VM and kept it up to date for Linux, Mac, and Unix systems. But because it only works on one platform Microsoft didn't attract any new developers just developers who needed an upgrade from Visual Studio 6.
or
Microsoft could make it a clean compile language with no VM and have all the robust library set and structure and have it run a full compile speeds. So MS Word, Excel and other applications could run native off the platform and developers who need higher performance systems have available tools.
Why Microsoft was eviler then Apple. is that .NET was crippled to keep sales of Windows OS's vs. Apple who's goal was to sell its main product and not cripple it to to say keep Mac Sales up (The did that for a little bit with the original iPod but quickly allowed windows to use it too)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This is now way, way offtopic, but you do understand that MSIL isn't interpreted, right? It's ALWAYS compiled to native code (either JIT or previously) before it's run.
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)