RIM has been having a tough month: the company has suffered the one-two punch of losing more smartphone market share to Android and iOS devices swiftly followed by the The Great BlackBerry Outage of 2011™.
On October 5th, comScore revealed that RIM’s share of the U.S. smartphone market had dropped to less than 20%. According to comScore’s August 2011 mobile rankings, RIM’s 19.7% share of the smartphone platform market is now less than half that of Android OS which has 43.7% of the market.
And if that wasn’t enough, the company then earned the ire of pretty much every BlackBerry owner in the entire world when it suffered the worst service outage in its history. For four days, users in first the Middle East, then Europe and finally North America experienced total disruption of their BlackBerry service: no email, no web-browsing, no connected apps – no smartphone. Many users were, however, able to access Twitter, leading to a lot of outraged tweets.
But there may have been a silver lining to the outage – safer roads. In the four days it took RIM to restore service after a ‘data bottleneck’ caused the global service disruption, police in Dubai and Abu Dhabi noticed something strange: a sudden drop in traffic crashes. Crash rates in Dubai dropped 20% during the outage – and in Abu Dhabi, they were a full 40% lower than average, according to The National.The chief of police in Dubai, Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan Tamim, and his counterpart in Abu Dhabi Brig Gen Hussein Al Harethi both linked the sudden drop in crashes to drivers’ lack of smartphones.
Said Brig Gen Hussein Al Harethi, ”Absolutely nothing has happened in the past week in terms of killings on the road and we’re really glad about that. People are slowly starting to realise the dangers of using their phone while driving. The roads became much safer when BlackBerry stopped working.”
Dubai has a crash every three minutes on average, while there is a crash fatality every two days in Abu Dhabi. Just last week, a well-known athlete, Theyab Amana, died after crashing his car into another vehicle – reportedly while using his BlackBerry.
When you consider that 6 million US employees drive company vehicles every day while using company issued Blackberry and Android smart phones — the Dubai numbers are extremely compelling from a risk management and safety perspective.
Imagine if all of them stopped using their smart phones to text, email and tweet while driving — how many crashes could we prevent? How many law suits could we avoid? How much money could we save? How many lives could we save?
Tell us what you think. We’d love to hear your opinion.
Image via @PiersMorgan