Today’s reaction was somewhat positive to RIM (Research in Motion) offering compensation in the form of free apps to its customers in an effort to make up for last week’s global BlackBerry outage that lasted as long three days for users in some parts of the globe. RIM will be offering free apps worth more than $100 to about 70 million customers “as an expression of appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions.” Not that they had any choice but to be patient. But still…
RIM is also extending its enterprise customers one month of free technical support. Technical support can be a costly expense to Blackberry users, so this is a valuable service offer. Even people who are already on existing, current tech support plans can enjoy the benefits of a free added month of service.
While this is all very well and good from RIM, the fact remains that its competitors continue coming on stronger than ever before, and the timing of the outage couldn’t have been much worse. It was the same week that Apple’s iPhone 4S came out, with iMessage (Apple’s own BlackBerry messaging-like service that does the very same thing, and then some.) There’s also Android to consider — the mobile operating system from Google that can run on several different smart phone hand sets.
Here’s a look at the numbers and how they were shaking out for RIM last year:
