Published in Mobiles

RIM says sorry to punters

by on14 October 2011



Four day outage is the kiss of death to the outfit


Research In Motion's co-CEOs said sorry to millions of BlackBerry customers for a four-day outage that has pretty much killed off any chance the outfit had of catching up with its rivals.

The system-wide failure, which began on Monday, left tens of millions of frustrated BlackBerry users on five continents without email, instant messaging and browsing. Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, who are rarely seen together, made a joint appearance at a news conference yesterday in a desperate bid to attempt to contain the fallout from the crisis.

RIM has had a series of profit warnings and seen its own tablet design mocked out of the market. It looks like RIM could face a bill for millions of dollars in compensation to customers who lost service. But the biggest kicker for RIM is that its best selling point was its reliability, network and messaging business.

RIM claims to have fixed the root cause of a global disruption in BlackBerry services and was working to clear a huge backlog caused by the outage. But the outage fanning the fires of  dissatisfaction with Lazaridis and Balsillie.  Companies do not have two CEOs for a reason and many analysts feel that this approach is causing problems for the outfit.

Reuters has pointed out that RIM's response to the crisis has been slow and poorly communicated. The saying of sorry should have been done within hours of the crisis and not on the fourth day.

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