Joyce Li's Blog

 

The major Blackberry outage that occurred last month left most of its 70 million worldwide users angry, frustrated, and without Internet and email services for four days.  This only further degraded RIM’s (Research in Motion) reputation, as Blackberry smartphones are becoming less popular and iPhones are seemingly taking over the smartphone market. Scrambling to save their tarnished image, they apologized to customers with a compensation of $100 worth of premium apps from Blackberry App World, free to download until December 31st. This compensation seemed to be good enough for most Blackberry consumers, myself included.

However, RIM has recently been hit with class-action lawsuits from angry consumers in the U.S. and Canada, accusing RIM of breach of contract, negligence, unjust enrichment, and failing to provide consumers with refunds for the loss of service. The argument is that consumers “paid for a service [they] did not receive.” They are demanding to be compensated for their Blackberry service fees and legal costs. If the lawsuit is successful, it could be very costly for RIM, as they generate $3.4 million in revenue every day, and have over 16 million users in the U.S.

I believe that these consumers are overreacting by suing RIM. Yes, it was highly inconvenient for those four days, but RIM has already extended a peace offering of free apps for all Blackberry users, and are doing everything to make sure that it won’t happen again. For those who are still not satisfied, they could simply switch to another smartphone. Why go through the hassle of lawsuits over a few dollars wasted during the outage? It just seems unreasonable to me.

Original article here.