Research in Motion is sorry for the nearly week-long global BlackBerry service outage that began October 10 and spread to affect an estimated 35 million customers. Really sorry. So the company is offering all BlackBerry customers $100-worth of premium apps for free and a month of free technical support.
In a press release posted online Monday, Canadian smartphone giant RIM provides a list of the first 12 apps that will be available, mostly games, including “SIMS 3” and “Texas Hold’em Poker 2.”
RIM expains that that the deal will begin on Wednesday, October 19 and last up until December 31, 2011. The release also includes more excessive kowtowing from RIM founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis, who on Thursday offered his first apology for the mass service disruption in an ultra-low budget YouTube video.
Sensing that wasn’t enough to placate the flood of customer complaints and calls for compensation from around the globe, Lazaridis also made the following comments in Monday’s release: “We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” added Lazaridis. “We have apologized to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence. We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again.”
But will free apps and free technical support plans really be enough to compensate for all of the problems caused by the service outage? (Which included everything from lost shoe-buying opportunities to delayed college classwork submissions.)
So far, the response of BlackBerry customers venting on social media has been decidedly mixed. A poll on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation website finds that the majority of respondents are satisfied with RIM’s response. Users on Twitter were less enthusiastic.
“The free apps play is obviously aimed at making developers happy more than it is about the customers who were without service for 3 days,” tweeted Eric Zeman, a mobile blogger at Phone Scoop.
“Corporate E-mail is important stuff, and delivering it reliably is utterly core to RIM’s mission and reputation,” pointed out Harry McCracken at Technologizer. “Free poker games feel like an off-topic way of making up for an e-mail outage. What would be more appropriate? Well, how about cash?”
Another critical question remains unanswered: What can RIM do to rally investors? The company’s stock price, already on a downswing, nosedived on Monday from $24.26 to $23.25, down over 4 percent at the time of this posting.
RIM’s got a chance to woo both investors and developers at its upcoming conference, BlackBerry DevCon, on October 18 to 20 in San Francisco, but especially after the service outage, the bar is a high one.
As tech analyst and RIM investor Chris Umiastowski opined in the Globe and Mail on Monday:
“Maybe RIM will share an early version of this big software update with attendees at DevCon. Maybe it will be the big shot in the arm we all need to see to maintain confidence. As a shareholder, I hope so. But I’m not walking in with a lot of confidence. RIM’s execution seems to be getting worse, not better.”
The big software update that all BlackBerry fans have been pining for is the introduction of a whole new line of BlackBerry devices running the QNX operating system, which BlackBerry acquired in April 2010 but has yet made use of.
And yet, if it can’t seize the moment, the RIM itself may yet pay the ultimate price: The company is set to lose over an estimated $100 million in third-quarter earnings due to the outage, according to a JP Morgan Chase analyst.
And with a new iPhone on the market racking up record-breaking first-weekend sales numbers (and commanding $2,000 in places where its not even officially available, namely the Chinese gray market), RIM’s formerly loyal BlackBerry customers are poised to desert the company in droves. Even in RIM’s once-thriving customer stronghold of India, the outage has some customers reconsidering, especially the youth market. That’s something free “Bejeweled” probably can’t cure.
