BlackBerry Phones Finally Saw an Increase in Use During Sony Outage
Sony Pictures was set to have a perfectly ok, yet completely un-newsworthy, 2014. Nothing could have prepared them for being the victim of the largest scale private company hacking destruction tour inflicted by a foreign attacker in U.S history.
As Sony was gearing up to release "The Interview," the story of James Franco and Seth Rogen as television talk-show front runners on a secret mission from the CIA to assassinate Kim Jong-Un, the leader and dictator of The Democratic People's Republic of Korea. North Korean leadership condemned the movie as an act of war, but has not specifically claimed responsibility for the attacks on Sony servers.
In a cruel tease of what BlackBerry once was, standing as a king among smartphones and the enterprise industry, Sony mentioned that during the outage they turned to an "old cache of BlackBerrys" for effective communication. While Sony servers were compromised, employees were unable to use company e-mail, or any sort of communication that traveled through Sony servers as they were compromised.
BlackBerrys, however, run on their own servers, another part of the strong history of BlackBerry leading the way on enterprise-minded security.
While Sony cancelled, then semi-un-cancelled, "The Interview," it still went on to make $15 million online and $1 million in ticket sales its first weekend. Granted, this is still less than what it cost to produce it, but at least they didn't suffer a total loss.
BlackBerry, on the other hand, is struggling to even stay above $10 a share, a company which was once $130 a share during its reign. BlackBerry has tried to recapture a small slice of market share with the BlackBerry classic, a literal throwback to the phones that used to sell well.
The classic will sell for $450 and is designed to resemble the BlackBerry Bold in its design, one of the best-selling devices from the now-ailing company. AT&T confirmed that it will offer the BlackBerry classic, and reminds consumers and investors that it was the first to support a BlackBerry device as Cingular back in 1999. Details on release date and pricing will be made available at a later date.
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