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RIM’s BlackBerry Storm handset.
(Credit: CNET) |
With BlackBerry`s sudden malfunctioning hardware, a failure in RIM`s internal workings, half of the planet lost their Black Berry connectivity. It lasted for days where BlackBerry users felt like their handset were more than useless.
After RIM stabilized its infrastructure, Black Berry realized that it has lost a great deal of customers in that outage, and to save the day ,it offered its customers a sweetener in the form of $100 worth of free premium apps of their choice.
However, the time couldn’t have been worse. This debacle coincided with Apple`s launch of the new iPhone 4S. This glamorous, technologically advanced, trust-worthy handset. Naturally, BlackBerry users turned into potential iPhone owners as soon as RIM`s network went down.
Gazelle’s “Chief Gadget Officer’ Anthony Scarsella told CNET that this is “easily the highest volume of BlackBerry trades ever seen period.” That includes a “spike” following this month’s outage. “In the grand scheme of BlackBerry growth over the past month, it can be pretty much entirely attributed to the launch of the iPhone 4S,” Scarsella said.
The question is not whether RIM can recover from this outage, but how many of its customers can it keep or are the business customers the only ones it will have left?
