Blackberry moves to appease customers

BlackBerry is to offer its customers free premium apps as part of an effort to appease millions who were left frustrated by service disruption for several days last week.

Research In Motion (Rim), which makes BlackBerry, said the complete selection of premium apps would be available to download at BlackBerry App World for four weeks from Wednesday.

The apps include games such as Bejeweled, a translation service and the music discovery tool Shazam.

Enterprise customers will also be offered one month of free technical support as an apology for the outage.

The offering, to compensate for a system failure that left tens of millions of Blackberry users on five continents without e-mail, instant messaging and browsing, could be expensive for Rim and it remains to be seen how many customers will see the offer as an acceptable response.

Analysts have said the company faces a wider problem from the damage to its reputation and loss of corporate customers who no longer think they can rely on the device.

"We've worked hard to earn their (customers') trust over the past 12 years and we're committed to providing the high standard of reliability they expect," Rim co-chief executive Mike Lazaridis said in a statement. "We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again."

Mr Lazaridis and his co-chief executive Jim Balsillie apologised last week to Blackberry customers for the four-day outage which tarnished the company's reputation and set back its drive to catch up with the likes of Apple and its iPhone.

Some mobile operators such as Spanish group Telefonica SA have already said they will compensate customers, although analysts believe they will also be looking at whether they can pass on some of those costs to Rim.

"Rim has responded swiftly but this won't undo the damage done to its reputation," analyst Geoff Blaber at CCS Insight said. "This may go some way to appeasing customers but what's critical is that the problem does not repeat itself."

Francisco Jeronimo at IDC said the decision was a clever move by Rim because it would help customers to discover the app service. He said the company was likely to have struck a deal with app developers to keep the cost down.

"For Rim, this is an interesting way to attract users to the App World and incentivise them to search and download apps," he said. "What Rim probably did was an agreement with developers and is not charging the percentage on revenues they keep when a user buys an app.

"More important than the offer itself, is that Rim is showing goodwill and being humble. They recognised the problem, apologised and now they are compensating their users."

Reuters