RIM apologizes for outage with free apps, free enterprise tech support
The worldwide BlackBerry outage that lasted three days last week disconnected an untold number of Research in Motion's 70 million customers, and the company today is offering compensation to its users with a couple of valuable packages of free (non-material) stuff.
For users, the entire catalog of premium apps in BlackBerry App World will be free to download for four weeks. Between Wednesday, October 19th and December 31, 2011, premium apps will be available free of charge to users, depending upon their device type, OS, and local regional restrictions.
For enterprise customers, RIM is offering a month of free Technical Support. For existing Technical Support customers, RIM will add a complimentary month onto the contract. For enterprise customers who don't have a Technical Support contract, RIM is offering a complimentary month of Enhanced Technical Support, the introductory level of support for BlackBerry devices, which includes 24 hour phone support and a guaranteed 4-hour response rate for all electronic incident tickets.
“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” said RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis in a statement on Monday. “We have apologized to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence. We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again.”
That's okay for customers, but how is the BlackBerry developer community responding to the fact that 3 days of downtime will result in 28 days of their premium products being given away for free?
The development community hasn't quite voiced its reaction yet. Although this weekend in a thread in the official BlackBerry developer forum, one developer declared that he wanted to "get off this ride," and remove all his apps for distribution in App World.
If you're a BlackBerry App developer, and your premium applications are being given away for free to appease customers for the network outage, how are you taking it? Even if you're not a BB dev, what do you think? Let us know in the comments!
Photo:Steve Heap/