RIM: A little transparency would go a long way

Research in Motion suffered an e-mail outage Friday and pretty soon its reputation may take a hit.

The cure: A little transparency. How about a dashboard indicating BlackBerry service levels?

As detailed by Russell Shaw on Friday RIM's email crawled at best. Russell also calls for some sort of Web system to detail outages. As reports trickled on in various blogs like Boy Genius and Silicon Alley Insider AP quoted RIM apologizing for the inconvenience.

But apologies won't cut it.

You'd think RIM's first outage five months ago would have taught the company a few lessons. The biggest lesson: Don't wait to tell customers about an outage.

To be sure, RIM has some moving parts here. It has to prod carriers to detail outages too. But most of these recent problems are due to RIM software glitches.

The response--or lack of one--from RIM just doesn't make sense. Meanwhile, RIM doesn't have to be creative as it looks for a fix. RIM should just copy what Salesforce.com did after its outages in late 2005 and January 2006. Following a few black eyes, Salesforce.com launched a dashboard that tracks uptime. It's simple, effective and transparent. RIM should blatantly copy this approach.

End note: BlackBerry caters to a customer base that's high end and wants uptime. These outages, which may not be a big deal in context, become excellent fodder for rivals. Microsoft the other day noted that Windows Mobile is designed for scale and a huge customer base. Don't be surprised if Microsoft quietly starts using these outages in its customer pitches.