BlackBerry maker RIM to give away apps and service following outage

RIM plans to offer customers free access to a selection of apps valued at more than $100, as an "expression of appreciation for their patience" during the outages that affected BlackBerry owners across great swaths of the planet last week (CP: With BlackBerry service resumed, RIM focused on winning back users).

Enterprise customers — presumably those without service-level agreements (SLAs) specifically dictating what constitutes appropriate compensation — are also being offered one month of free Technical Support. Customers who don't currently subscribe to Technical Support can instead try out RIM's support service — and Enhanced Support, at that — for a month, free of charge.

“We truly appreciate and value our relationship with our customers," RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said in a statement. "We’ve worked hard to earn their trust over the past 12 years, and we’re committed to providing the high standard of reliability they expect, today and in the future.”

Lazaridis added that he and his colleagues plan to "work tirelessly" to restore customers' confidence in the company, and that they're taking "immediately and aggressive steps" to make sure it doesn't happen again.

With services and solutions increasingly offered over mobile devices and the cloud, however, it seems inevitable — and one that mobile users, regardless of their services or provider, will at some point have to bear.

"We should remember that there is no such thing as a totally fail-proof system," Analyst Jack Gold, with J. Gold Associates, wrote in an Oct. 13 research note, commenting on RIM's situation.

"SMS systems have gone down. Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail have gone down. Carrier outages, while rare, have occurred. Even iTunes has had glitches on occasion," Gold continued. "So we need to be careful to understand all systems can have this kind of issue, and we need to look at the relative up time of the system (although obviously everyone always focuses on down time because of the disruption)."

Neil Mawton, director of Wireless Device Strategies at Strategy Analytics, told Connected Planet last week that his firm believes "a sincere apology from RIM should suffice for consumer users, while enterprise customers, if they have been affected, will be seeking extra reassurances that any major outages will not reoccur in the future.”

Is RIM setting a standard for compensation?

"Expectations for RIM are higher than for most other mobility focused companies, since RIM established itself as an enterprise-grade solutions provider," says analyst Ken Hyers, with Strategy Analytics. "Customers expect RIM products to work, and to be reliable."

The inevitability of outages, even rare ones — Gold estimated that RIM's up time was approximately 99.97% — paired with a growing reliance on cloud services, often by businesses whose lean budgets make them unlikely to be negotiating SLAs, suggests a need for greater dialogue about each partner's expectations following a service lapse. How much inconvenience, or lost or delayed business, does an "I'm sorry" cover?