This would have been brilliant 10 years ago. If BBM was open to non-blackberries, it could have killed WhatsApp before it began. It's weird to think of how popular Blackberries & BBM was back in the day. I was in high school in 2007, and it was cool to have a Blackberry. BBM was how people communicated with their crushes. If Blackberry had the vision, they could have preempted much of the current craze for social messaging.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and it's entirely possible that opening BBM up would have radically cannibalized Blackberry sales.
The article's comparison to Twilio is interesting. Twilio's market cap is 2.64B [1], while Blackberry's is 3.84B [2]. I'd bet heavily that Twilio overtakes Blackberry soon.
So many established players blew it on messaging. Microsoft could've had WhatsApp if they used their decade head-start to make Skype not suck so much. Google could've had it if they stopped rebooting their messaging strategy completely once a year and just stuck with something for a change (my vote would've been for Wave, but just pick something). Apple could've had it with iMessage if they didn't stick to the iPhone strategy tax. None of them saw how important it would be and are now scrambling to catch up.
Skype, anyone remember MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ...the list goes on! Companies have been winning and shortly after failing at this game for decades.
Perhaps because users don't care what app they use to send messages with? Text messages is like this universal thing we do. Nobody cares which phone their friend uses when calling each other, as long as the other person has a phone too it's all good. Messages should be like decentralized signals, and "apps" should be the radios of those signals. Nobody is going to "win" messages. People are sending messages with whatsapp, sms, facebook, snapchat........
I'm surprised that Wave had a messaging system in it. As far as I could tell, it was just a weird collaborative outliner. How did you get to the messaging system?
well, it was looking like an email client (sender[s]/recipient[s] + message thread), but was "realtime", so it's not difficult to see it as an instant messenger (the parent message wasn't referring to a chat box inside Wave). But then again, it's not difficult to see any social network as a glorified forum if you look hard enough
Lynch was an abomination to support, it was billed as a kind of a sip client and messenger combo but of course they Microsofted it. They didn't want an extension or phone number tied to it so people could only call you if you were in the same network and had the software installed.
Yep. I doubt many people will care about this in 2017. The network effect they had 10 or even 5 years ago would have been a great sell, but you can get the same thing for free now, and all of your friends are probably already on one or more of the alternative services. Entering the market when WhatsApp / Line / WeChat / Telegram / Viber / Kik / Kakao / Weibo / Facebook Messenger / iMessage exist seems like a bad idea.
But that's not who this product is competing with. From TFA: "Mr. Beard positioned the IP-based system as superior to similar services offered by competitors such as Twilio". It's an SDK for building secure voice and text communications into your applications, not a consumer IM service meant to compete with WhatsApp et al. (that would be the consumer BBM app, available in the App/Play Store). Knowing BlackBerry, they will probably be mainly targeting developers in the medical and financial industries with this product.
Doubt they still have enough expertise to pull this off and even if they do I think it'll have to operate on low Marin's and lose money for a while to get to scale. That's not something blackberry can stomach at the moment.
> Everyone was utterly shocked. RIM was even in denial the day after the iPhone was announced with all-hands meets claiming all manner of weird things about iPhone: It couldn't do what they were demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor; it must have terrible battery life, etc. Imagine their surprise when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it. It was ridiculous, it was brilliant.
The story of their reaction to the iPhone is a bit more nuanced. It's fleshed out in more detail in the book "Losing the Signal" which is a look at RIMM from it's inception in the 1980s up to around 2013 when their market share had collapsed.
Basically, both Lazaridis and Balsillie agreed that they should downplay the innovation in the iPhone when in public. Internally however, they were scrambling to build a competitor because Verizon told them to. RIMM's business was very heavily tied into US and international carriers and serving enterprise clientele, and none of them had asked for anything like the iPhone, so they just never bothered.
100% this but the thing that's missing, is BBM's Pin feature.
WhatsApp still don't have that.
You used to be able to give out your pin and not your phone number and used to be able to sign up for mailing list / nightclub entry without your number passing anyone's hands.
Just curious, why would you "bet heavily" Twilio overtakes Blackberry's market cap "soon"?
It's an interesting view to have, considering you know Twilio's value has been free falling (they are down like -60% in the last few months) and as of this week they just gained a new competitor with more money than them.
I have no clue what is going to happen, but wondering if I missed something as you seem pretty confident.
1. Focus. Twilio does communication. What does Blackberry do these days? Hell if I know, a bit of everything and nothing. They've lost a lot of credibility in a lot of enterprises after those companies moved over to iPhones and Androids.
2. Ease of integration. Also, related to that, is the encryption component really required? Most companies that have Twilio integrated aren't going to swap it out for this, I assume. Some might, most won't. It's more of a niche offering.
There's a lot this Blackberry product can't do, because you need to integrate the key exchange in an app. Twilio handles functionality outside of apps (i.e. plain SMS and voice) as well.
3. Ramp up. Just because you announce a new product doesn't mean it'll be generating hundreds of millions in the next few quarters. It'll take years to ramp up + have it generating decent revenue. They haven't planted their seeds yet, so to say.
4. Momentum: Twilio might be down 60% after a massive run up after its IPO, but it looks like it the stock has found support now. Blackberry however is down over 96% from the height of 2007.
5. Acquisition potential. They're close to Amazon. I wouldn't be surprised if they acquire the company within the next 6-12 months.
Unsure as to how this will play out, but I'm more bullish on Twilio than I am on Blackberry. Actually, I just bought some shares last month at $28.
Blackberry however is down over 2300% from the height of 2007.
It cannot be more than 100% down. It's roughly 96% down from it's height in 2007.
That said, it seems quite disingenuous to use the absolute peak of Blackberry when it was almost a decade ago. You could easily look at BBRY over the time frame since Twilio IPO'd and see that BBRY was flat or slightly growing.
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Apart from that, I agree with everything else you said except for (5), can you explain how Blackberry is 'close to Amazon'?
If Amazon decides to partner instead of build, I think that's an excellent sign. Amazon has also participated in their last investment round I believe, before they went public. And I vaguely remember reading something about Jeff Lawson and Jeff Bezos knowing each other well, but I'm not entirely sure whether that's correct and/or if I remember that right.
Twilio and Amazon do appear to have connections. Lawson worked at Amazon briefly. Rick Dalzell is the former CIO of Amazon and sits on Twilio's board (I would imagine he knows Bezos better than Lawson).
But executives from two companies having a close relationship is not a reason why a company acquires the other. There needs to be a catalyst. Friend's don't buy friend's companies without good reason. Are the gains way way way better than staying 2 separate companies who are partners? Did the little company fuck up and needs help getting out?...
Twilio might be an acquisition target. But I would be surprised if it's Amazon. Many reasons but mainly if Jeff Bezos starts buying public tech companies at a premium and in a price range that's 3x larger than anything Amazon has ever acquired, well I will eat my frickin shoe.
Never know of course, you may be right, maybe there is valuable IP there that AWS needs or maybe Jeff and Jeff are way better friends than anyone thought...
With that said, maybe Salesforce is a buyer? They were also a Twilio Series E investor and Benioff will buy fucking anything it seems without rhyme or reason and at any price. I wonder if there is extra office space in that big building he built and needs filling up, dude loves shopping.
Btw that link...Businessinsider is not a reliable nor accurate nor ethical source for business news. They are basically a tabloid churning out sensationalist BS and clickbait and opinions dressed as fact. Be wary.
Best of luck on your trade. Looks like you got a good price too. cheers.
This would be believable if it weren't for the fact that—ESPECIALLY in 2007 as a high school kid(!?)—it was absurd to buy a smartphone unless you were tied to email. It was just too expensive compared to, say, texting + the $50 flip phone.
In high schools perhaps but certainly not in the corporate world.
In a "promo", I got Blackberry Enterprise Server (some "Express" version, IIRC) and 15 device licenses when I got my first Blackberry (I was the first Blackberry user at $company). Within maybe 60 days or so -- after a few execs found out they could get their e-mail on a phone -- we were running the full BES product and constantly purchasing additional licenses to support more devices.
A few years later, Apple announced this new product called an "iPhone" and it was all downhill from there.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and it's entirely possible that opening BBM up would have radically cannibalized Blackberry sales.
The article's comparison to Twilio is interesting. Twilio's market cap is 2.64B [1], while Blackberry's is 3.84B [2]. I'd bet heavily that Twilio overtakes Blackberry soon.
[1]: https://ycharts.com/companies/TWLO/market_cap
[2]: https://ycharts.com/companies/BBRY/market_cap