In BlackBerry maker, RIM has said that beginning October 19 a selection of premium apps would become available to download without charge at BlackBerry App World for four weeks. The company has also announced that it will offer its corporate clients who use the secure "enterprise" network a month of free technical support as an apology for the outage.
The freebies are RIMs way of compensating users for the system failure that left tens of millions of Blackberry users on five continents without email, instant messaging and browsing. The freebies 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.
RIM co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie apologized last week to millions of Blackberry customers for the four-day outage, which may have set back its drive to catch up with Apple and other competitors. In a statement, Mike Lazaridis, Co-CEO at RIM said, 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.
"We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again," he added.
Shares of RIM have dropped about 1.5 percent in early Nasdaq trading on Monday. This year, the stock has seen considerable amount of beating, as investors got worried about BlackBerry losing market share to Apple Inc's iPhone and devices powered by Google's Android system.
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