I'm convinced BB went extinct because despite having first mover advantage in their game changing blackberry messenger app, RIM refused to make it cross platform. Instead of becoming Whatsapp, they built a moat around themselves thinking it would sell more handsets but instead everyone just walked away from their castle.
A messaging app wouldn't have saved them. Messaging apps didn't make money, enterprise subscriptions to the BES ecosystem did.
The Whatsapp comparison doesn't make sense. Blackberry was a profitable B2B communications company with thousands of employees and deep hardware and networks expertise. Whatsapp was like 10 guys who never had a revenue strategy, who got acquihired by Facebook and were never heard from again.
