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vivalahn | 4 months ago

Another road that leads to BBM it seems.

It’s utterly bizarre how BBM could have been the iMessage and WhatsApp and who knows what else. But rich out-of-touch people thinking exclusivity is a perk in a commodities market just shows how business savvy and wealth are in reality disconnected from eachother.

discuss

j45|4 months ago

BBM was the iMessage and WhatsApp before either of those.

WhatsApp became popular specifically because it was a multi-platform replacement for BBM.

BBM had little else to offer in terms of apps. It was a corporate ecosystem and good at that part of it.

iMessage also came out after BBM, and did their own device lock in, except iPhones were designed for the many instead of the few, especially beginners to smartphones.

scrlk|4 months ago

In 2012, Jim Balsillie (then co-CEO of RIM with Mike Lazaridis) had actually planned this, but the board rejected the idea: https://www.theregister.com/2012/04/13/balsillie_plan_open_b...

stackskipton|4 months ago

BBM could have been great lock in IF OS and Hardware experience was not so bad.

For vast majority, Android vs iPhone is not massively different so iMessage availability is a draw for some people.

vivalahn|4 months ago

BBM itself should not have been a lock-in. It would have taken incredibly little effort to open it as a desktop messenger that can seamlessly interact with people who have BBM numbers for example.

I doubt they learned their lessons. Apple walked all over them in so many ways and, if memory serves me right, they even mocked Steve Jobs over the iPhone.

Edit: just so I’m clear I’m discussing it from the perspective of early to mid 2000s. iPhone hadn’t yet come out, but iPods were popular. Trillian and Pidgin were dominating the online landscape of software that could support multiple chat protocols - seamless ICQ, AIM, IRC, Yahoo, MSN Messenger, all in one program. If there was a time for RIM to corner the market here it was right then and there because BBM was the real deal, being available on phones and they could have signed agreements with others to bring it to, for example, Nokia and Motorola and whoever else.

But no. They’d rather be arrogant and stupid.

falcor84|4 months ago

Just to assist perplexed netizens like myself, apparently in addition to being an acronym for Big Beautiful Men, BBM also stands for BlackBerry Messenger [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBM_(software)

thaumasiotes|4 months ago

Weird. If I wanted to send messages from my BlackBerry, I used AIM. I had no awareness of BBM (despite owning a BlackBerry), nor would it have provided nonzero value even if I had heard of it.

This does not suggest to me that BBM was somehow positioned for mass adoption. There was no problem for it to solve. It was worse than the existing messaging landscape.

(If I had wanted to send a message to someone else whose only mode of communication was their BlackBerry, a situation that never arose, I would have emailed them. Convenient email was the BlackBerry's entire marketing strategy. Note that this works just as well on smartphones today.)

noarchy|4 months ago

We got BBM on Android and iOS. Alas, by then it was mostly too late. It got some initial traction but that didn't last.