Rich Fiscus
17 Oct 2011 12:02
RIM will be giving away free apps with a total value of more than US $100 to BlackBerry owners affected by an outage of the the company's services for more than 3 days last week.
Unlike other smartphone makers, RIM's business is built in large part around their own service offerings which include messaging and email servers. They primarily cater to businesses, which is why they were the number 1 smartphone platform in the US before the iPhone came along.
In a statement, RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said:
We truly appreciate and value our relationship with our customers. We've worked hard to earn their trust over the past 12 years, and we're committed to providing the high standard of reliability they expect, today and in the future.
In addition to the free apps, RIM will also be giving BlackBerry owners a free month of premium tech support, something that will likely be much more valuable to their large number of corporate customers.
With BlackBerry owners increasingly abandoning the platform in favor of the iPhone and Android, the loss of those services for an extended period probably couldn't have happened at a worse time.
You can bet Google, Apple, and Microsoft see it as an opening to promote their own offerings, along with their smartphones, in the corporate world.