No. Today Was Your Day to Watch the Network and My Day to Code Virtual BlackBerry …

Could this be the real reason for Research in Motion’s (RIM) widespread BlackBerry outage last week: the company’s engineers were so busy developing this virtual BlackBerry software that everyone’s chattering about today that they forgot they were supposed to keep an eye on the company’s wireless infrastructure? This morning RIM announced new software that will allow smart phones from rival handset makers to effectively emulate the entire look and feel of RIM’s popular BlackBerry wireless email device. It’s an interesting move for the company, which has for years been offering rivals only very limited access to its services via its BlackBerry Connect program. Looks like RIM has finally realized that if it wants to dominate the market for U.S. wireless email, it must expand its reach to more customers, including those who want the service but don’t want to switch devices. “We never created BlackBerry to lock in the devices,”