For Heins, RIM’s ace in the hole is BlackBerry Messenger, which he says delivers mobile messaging capabilities that are unique in the smartphone market. “[BBM is] what attracts people to BlackBerry,” he said. “This is our BlackBerry experience we can deliver — there’s no other system out there where you can read, write, check if you’ve read my message. We want to make it as differentiated as possible. Going cross platform and opening up would be losing that advantage. I think there’s a huge difference between somebody who just provides the phone and the hardware and someone who provides services.”
Did someone note give Heins the memo about iMessage which gives a identical BBM experience integrated with the SMS app?
Source: I'm old and I remember that happening.
Supplemented by the fact the article specifically mentions that fact.
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"