RIM Trips Twice During Holiday Season
At a time of year when consumers are considering new electronics purchases, the last thing a company might want to have happen is a service failure. Unfortunately, that happened to RIM not once but twice within the critical 10 days before Christmas, when holiday shoppers are seeing aggressive messages for the Droid, myTouch, and iPhone and moving from consideration to purchase.
One Twitter user named "unclesu" summed up the the Blackberry addict's frustration with continuing interruptions to their service, "2nd BB network outage in 2 weeks for N.Am. Fix it, RIM!."
A week ago, RIM announced third quarter income had increased 59% on record smartphone sales. The company indicated it increased sales to consumers substantially, and the Blackberry-maker claims the mix of their new subscribers skews heavily towards the consumer segment, with fewer than one in five new customers coming from the business segment. But within 24 hours of heralding positive financial results, RIM customers experienced their first of two pre-holiday messaging service outages. When service was restored, the company stated they had "isolated and resolved the issue that affected" customers. The latest outage affecting messaging services for RIM customers, however, appears to be related to Blackberry Messenger software updates the company made available to existing users. It's unclear whether the preliminary analysis of the most recent service interruption may also explain last week's problems.
RIM built the company on the trust of enterprise IT managers, offering them tools to manage message delivery to corporate employees, and providing information security that made companies comfortable to permit mobile devices access to proprietary company information when they were away from their desktop PC. Since that time, smartphones like the Apple iPhone, the T-Mobile Sidekick, the Palm Pre and the Moto Cliq have enabled individual users to sync Outlook email with their phones, changing the competitive landscape. Consumers also have access to POP and IMAP Internet email service on many feature phones today.
Without a major holiday phone to push, RIM has definitely lost some trust with their existing customers, who are vocalizing their frustration with the devices they have come to depend on. As another Twitter user, feistyfoodie, commented, "Thank THE LORD the Blackberry/RIM outage was yesterday, not today, or I might seriously punch someone on line here at Toys R Us."
Follow Technorati