CANADA – The founder of Research in Motion has issued an honest apology following extended service blackouts, a worrying sign that the company still think people are using BlackBerrys.
An unexpected technical failure left devices across Europe, Africa and the United States unable to access email, web or messaging services for several consecutive days.
The company was forced to admit a large percentage of their user base experienced the problem, “at least six or maybe even a dozen people” according to internal estimates.
They’re out there somewhere
On Thursday, RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis issued a video apology in what pundits are calling a troubling example of a company that were under the impression that they still had customers to apologise to.
Mr Lazaridis said: “To those people still using our phones, we know you’re out there somewhere and we are very sorry.”
He also apologised for the service outage.
Following the mea culpa, technology experts said the blackout must have done severe damage to the company’s perception of its market value – enough to make them think it was worth apologising for an incident most people followed on their iPhones.
One expert felt “this apology shows RIM still think it’s 2005 and people are using BlackBerry devices. That is a real concern.”
Disconnected
Many feared that RIM executives were suffering from “core relevance failure” which has given them the impression that large numbers of people were waiting for the service to come back up.
As the worst of the outage looks to have passed however, the Canadian firm announced it would press ahead with its plan to apologise to Blackberry users personally, “just as soon as we find some.”
Mr Lazaridis said: “As a company we sincerely believe that there are people still using our devices and to those people we say, please get in touch and let us know you exist.”
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