Bitter Blackberry

This might be the end for Blackberry (RIM).  I'm not saying they will collapse tomorrow, but a once dominant giant has now fallen to the bottom of the pit.

I'll go back as far as the tablet failure.  It was released half-baked, and wouldn't even allow users to have full range of use, yet the price was outrageous.  Once upon a time, Blackberry was able to charge a premium for their devices, but after a long string of failures that time has passed.  Users were angry, and rightfully so, at the incomplete development and the patch and repatch updates that cause more aggravation than they resolve.

Then the Bold 9900 came out and was supposed to revolutionize cell technology, and re-establish Blackberry as the top producer. Snore.  First, it's the same glitchy crap that one has come to expect, with resource-hogging "improvements" that actually bog down an already struggling processor.

Now we have this: a global outage.  Millions of Blackberry users are not getting full service right now, something Research In Motion is trying to fix.  It's recently spread to the U.S. but in the last eight weeks there have been tremors and flickers in available service, culminating in one massive outage that just keeps growing.

RIM had better put their best foot forward, or their journey may come to an end.  Consumers are fickle, and the population has figured out that Android is a lot more open and far fewer hoops to dance through.