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.
