RIM's $100 App World outage compensation: Good move

You’ll have no doubt heard that RIM will shortly be offering $100 worth of application downloads to every consumer as compensation for last week’s outages. This is a good move, for a number of reasons.

1. It’s a tangible offering — real apps, real brand names
2. It’s a recognition of the annoyance and frustration that many did feel
3. It’s highlighting App World in the press
4. In order to take advantage of the deal, the consumer will need to have App World installed and activated — I’m sure there are still quite a lot out there who don’t have this properly setup yet, so this should convert a few more folk
5. It’s not actually $100 credit, indeed it should be quite cost effective for RIM
6. It draws a line in the sand for RIM — many that I’ve spoken to have already forgotten the outages

Now then you’d think that the $100 of apps would be in the form of a credit, right? Not quite. RIM has been very clever with the offer. Here are the apps you can get for free on Wednesday:

SIMS 3 (Electronic Arts)
Bejeweled (Electronic Arts)
N.O.V.A. (Gameloft)
Texas Hold’em Poker 2 (Gameloft)
Bubble Bash 2 (Gameloft)
Photo Editor Ultimate (Ice Cold Apps)
DriveSafe.ly Pro (iSpeech.org)
iSpeech Translator Pro (iSpeech.org)
Drive Safe.ly Enterprise (iSpeech.org)
Nobex Radio™ Premium (Nobex)
Shazam Encore (Shazam)
Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant (Vlingo)

Anyone that’s been around the BlackBerry ecosystem for any length of time will recognise every app there. I’d go so far as to say that it looks to me like RIM will have put together a really good deal for those developers to avoid having to pay anywhere near full price to include the app in this compensation offer. Each of the developers in the list is exceedingly well known to RIM.

The app list is well chosen. They’re all good ones.

If you’re an enterprise customer, then you’ll apparently be shortly getting details about how you can qualify for some free tech support from RIM. That is perfectly fine. It’s a line drawn under the sand. Although I suspect most of the enterprises in question will smile nicely and move on. Memories are short and I suspect a lot of enterprises are already getting on with life now that things are back to normal.

So good move RIM!