The developer of Blackberry smartphone is currently busy on fixing their service. They want to end a three-day global service disruption frustrating millions of customers and inflated pressure on its management to make extensive changes.
On Wednesday, Research In Motion, hurriedly announced conference call, vowing to deliver all suspended email and instant messages to customers in five continents upset by the outage.
It afterward told some of its corporate clients that might not entirely clear up the gargantuan backlog of messages until Thursday morning on the U.S. East Coast.
The outage – and RIM’s sluggish communications among its customers – has stirred up rising discontent among its co-chief executives, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie.
Critics have asked for a shake-up, saying the top managers did not take care of the company as they let the company fall too far behind Apple and other rivals in a rapidly varying market.
Richard Levick, who runs a consultancy that specializes in crisis management, says that the board needs a decisive action; they must draw a line in the sand.
Though RIM’s stock descent modestly on Wednesday, its shares have already fallen down for over 50 percent this year on a sequence of profit warnings and product missteps – a sharp turnaround of fortune for a company that once conquered the smartphone market.
This week’s disruption – the nastiest from the time when an outage swept North America two years ago – may have damaged RIM’s once-sterling standing for secure and dependable message delivery – possibly its No. 1 selling feature.
RIM is exceptional amongst handset makers, as it compresses and encrypts data rather than pushing it to BlackBerry devices through carrier networks. Apple and others rely on the carrier networks in handling all routing and delivery of content.
Even before the service disruption occurred this week’s disruptions, a lot of companies had begun to balk at paying a premium to be locked into RIM’s service. Some letting allowing employees in using alternative smartphones, particularly Apple’s iPhone for corporate mail, and the outage could speed up the trend.
One example of companies that are now letting their employees to use other alternatives is DLA Piper, a law firm with 4,200 attorneys globally. It is speeding up discussions about changing to iPhones and Android devices, as claimed by Don Jaycox, its chief information officer, said on Wednesday.
The corporate defections make a successful software transition even extra crucial to RIM. The company is preparing in shifting its line of BlackBerry smartphones to the new central operating system initially used in the poorly received PlayBook tablet.