RIM Investor Dissent Grows Amid Embarrassing Service Failures

Dissent among RIM investors grows, with vocal management critic Jaguar claiming support for the Canadian company being sold or broken up has increased in the space of a month. The commercial bank is demanding a "transformative leader" in place of the current co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, Reuters reports, and says it has the backing of 8-percent of investor backers, a rise from the roughly 5-percent Jaguar said it had back in September.

"Our supportive shareholders approve Jaguar's plan to negotiate, at this point in time, changes in governance and the pursuit of a value creation transaction," Jaguar Chief Executive Vic Alboini says. "Everybody is in support of a sale of RIM or another value creative transaction. Like splitting the company into separate public companies – a network company, a device company and a patents company."

The renewed criticism comes as RIM suffers a second day of embarrassing BlackBerry Messenger outages across the EMEA region. First surfacing yesterday, and then briefly fixed earlier today before going offline again, the BBM failure couldn't have happened at a worse time for the company. Apple is set to launch iMessage, a part of the iOS 5 upgrade for the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod touch, iPad and iPad 2 (as well as preloaded on iPhone 4S), tomorrow, October 12, a direct competitor to BBM.

Jaguar claims it is yet to target the bulk of current RIM investors, and that it expects to gather even more support for its split or sale plans. "We are going to go out and see how many more we can get" Alboini warns.