Guess what RIM has been up to today! Actually wait, before you take your guess, let’s just poke a little fun at the answer.
What should a company do when one of its biggest competitors launches a new product after receiving overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics and two million pre-orders in 24 hours for said product? That’s a complex question to answer that I’ll let the marketing team figure out. I can tell you what not to do though. A company should avoid having an outage of its own service and issuing a public apology for it on the same day of that competitor launch.
Now guess.
“Some users in Europe, Middle East & Africa are experiencing issues with their BlackBerry service,” RIM’s UK branch wrote on Twitter this morning. “We are investigating and apologize for any inconvenience.” Some hours following the acknowledgment, RIM announced that the problems were solved and apologized once more.
To be fair, Apple does have its share of iCloud outages from time to time, but damn it RIM. It’s almost as if RIM has been sliding down a gigantic mountain to face death from sharp rocks below, and with every announcement it makes, the slide down becomes steeper. Compared to the outage of yesteryear affecting millions of BlackBerry users for days, this is minor, but it all adds up to one bad PR situation.
Still hanging by a single thread, RIM is willing to put all that baggage in the past and focus on its last chance for survival: BlackBerry 10.