Research In Motion (RIM), the maker of Blackberry, looks to be in trouble. With their recent black-out that ended up reaching many parts of the US and most of Canada, RIM has taken a huge hit in the public eye.
And the worst part is, RIM needs to get some good press right now. Apple’s iPhone 4S just sold over 4 million units in the first weekend. RIM’s Blackberry hasn’t been selling as popularly as it once was. RIM’s getting some flack now in the press for having faulty networks. The recent service black-out was said to be caused by a backlogging issue, and started somewhere in the middle east. But at the time, RIMs president said that it was a local issue with the Middle East service backlog, however this soon spread to a world wide service outage. The outage rendered the Blackberry devices useless. So much so that according to The National, “Traffic accidents fell 20% during the three days that the messaging service was unavailable.”
The outage left over half of the 70 million Blackberry users without service for over 3 days. So what is RIMs solution? Free apps. Yeah, that’s all. RIM is offering free apps to its users until the end of the year. Kinda sounds familiar doesn’t it? Kinda seems like RIM is pulling a Sony after what happened to the Playstation Network a few months back with the supposed “Anonymous” hacking. Either way, RIM is trying to cover it’s faults with free gifts. But does this business tactic work? I suppose it is a good thing for the end user, get a free app or two and enjoy. But what has RIM done to fix this issue? RIM seems to be fading out of the limelight quickly, especially now that Apple’s iPhone is available for $0 on contract, from the 3 largest cell providers in the US. RIM was once the top of the smartphone market. Now it needs to really turn itself around and start giving it’s customers the quality and integrity from RIM and Blackberry that they expect.
No comments:
Post a Comment