Que Horrible! The unthinkable happened last night. Blackberry's e-mail service provided by RIM (Research in Motion) went down about 8pm EST Tuesday night, but was back up in time for the morning commute. That being said, it's been a long day of service operating in fits and starts while it catches up on the backlog that piled up overnight.

The outage affected North American customers only. I say only, as if eight million people make a mere cocktail party. Nope that's eight million people, eight million very twitchy customers who really, reeealllly need their e-mail - NOW!

Hang in there. The worst should be over by now.

Google Bytes

Rumors are flying around the blogosphere today that plans are afoot to launch the Google phone by the end of the year. The phone would be built on the Texas Instruments 3G Platform and feature, duh, gmail and Google maps. However, it's not expected to include GPS software (bad news for that guy in the Avis car rental commercial). This sounds like a set-up for a celebrity deathmatch with Apple's soon to be shipped iPhone. My money's on Apple for the first couple of rounds, after that I would never bet against Google.

Speaking of going Mano a Mano...

It's official Google plans to soon launch its own version of PowerPoint. CEO Eric Schmidt didn't quite put it that way at today's announcement during the final hours of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. He softpeddled it, assuring the press (and Steve Balmer?) that this will not be a direct competitor to Microsoft's PowerPoint software. Google's version will be a web-based application (of course) used to make presentations and slide shows.

PowerPoint, of course, is used to make, er, uh, presentations and slideshows.

There are a couple of big differences, however. The Google version is free and makes for easy online collaboration since it's web-based - and it's Google. And it will partner well with that 'Docs & Spreadsheets' application they already offer (which bears no resemblence to Word or Excel).

Did you ever think there would be a company that would manage to create headaches in both Redmond and Cupertino all in the same day?