BlackBerry Messenger Shuts Down For Good Today (engadget.com) 66
Today, Emtek pulls the plug on BlackBerry Messenger. From a report: The company announced last month that it would shut down the consumer service, which has been steadily losing users and failing to attract new ones. As a consolation for diehard fans, BlackBerry opened BBM Enterprise, its enterprise-grade encrypted Messenger (BBMe), for personal use. That's available on Android, iOS, Windows and Mac. Three years ago, the company set out to reinvigorate BBM consumer service, but those efforts fell flat. "We poured our hearts into making this a reality, and we are proud of what we have built to date," BlackBerry wrote on its blog. "The technology industry however, is very fluid, and in spite of our substantial efforts, users have moved on to other platforms, while new users proved difficult to sign on."
Canada (Score:1, Flamebait)
And thus dies another Canadian tech company. Darn Trump.
Trump may be guilty of a lot, but not this (Score:3)
Blame Steve Jobs. He created the smartphone market as it is today, but Blackberry didn't bother to keep up in the hardware race and so they lost users. Ditto Nokia. The company has no one else to blame for its current situation other than itself.
Complacency is common in the computing industry and the story always ends the same way. Some others who fell by the wayside for the same reason off the top of my head are Commodore, Atari, Sun, SGI, DEC, Digital Research and IBM & HP only just escaped by the ski
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Blame Steve Jobs... The company has no one else to blame for its current situation other than itself.
Re:Trump may be guilty of a lot, but not this (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't blame Jobs. Blame Blackberry, who had the near monopoly on "Smart Phones" at the time, and decided that milking everyone for extra $$ for everything from enabling GPS to Email Syncing.
Not providing "value added", but charging monthly for turning on an on/off switch that did nothing more than enabling GPS.
Jobs/Apple made a better product, and didn't nickle or time people.
Microsoft enabled email sync or charge an extra $100 / user to do so.
Blackberry killed themselves with hubris, the same hubris that sank the Titanic. Thinking you're unsinkable leads to sunken ships. By the time the iceberg (competition) was spotted, the speeding ship was unable to change course.
I know, because I had all those issues with Blackberry while I was still a huge fan of theirs. They treated me like I should be happy paying them stupid amounts of money for what others were giving away for free with better service and products that cost the same or less. I only had blackberry for about 3 years. They never did enable GPS that was built in my phone.
Crippleware is a terrible business model.
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1) Consumers don't care
2) Consumers didn't care
3) Consumers won't care
They didn't die because of those things, they died because they didn't cater to their consumers. Consumers found better alternatives for less, and the hubris of Blackberrry thought Consumers should be happy paying more for less capable products.
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No, they died because they made it expensive and difficult to use their services compared to the competition. I started in '06 at a small company that had a couple of the executive staff using Blackberry devices. At the time we used Zimbra mail, which emulated Exchange for many services. I had a Windows Mobile device and all I had to do was put in the new server settings and credentials and my device picked up no problem and synced everything. For the BB users, we were forced to either pay for BES and d
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"How was Sun complacent?"
Stupid pricing. Even at the end they thought they could still charge 10K+ for a desktop workstation that had no more power than a top of the range PC.
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Except SUN workstations were not premium hardward except for the CPUs. They were commodity hardware with a premium pricetag and not very reliable in my experience.
And a Mac is just an overpriced PC.
Re: Canada (Score:1)
Blackberry has actually been doing surprisingly well. I gave it up for dead several years ago.
losing a non-revenue generating consumer oriented service is probably a smart thing.
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Unfortunately we can only blame Blackberry for this one. They had it all, and threw it all away in their arrogance.
If they had opened up BBM to the world as everyone had asked, they'd have become the defacto messaging stardard second only the SMS. If they had made more varied products as people had demanded, they would have been ok But no, they thought they had achieved the penultimate design in phones and refused to believe that that design could or should change. And so they got steamrolled by Apple.
I
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Watson, come here I need you (Score:2)
Who will get to make the last Message? What will it be? Hopefully profound.
Re:Watson, come here I need you (Score:4, Informative)
According to Emtek the final message was "DTF?"
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According to Emtek the final message was "DTF?"
-- Barack Obama
Sent from my iPhone.
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"So long and thanks for all the phish."
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I know no one will read this and it's bad form to reply to yourself. But I just had another thought:
Mine is the last voice that you will ever hear. Don't be alarmed." [youtube.com]
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I'd go with
40
Never understood single-vendor communication (Score:3)
I never understood why people are stupid enough to use communication protocols/applications why are only available on a single platform by a single vendor.
I understand it changed when they realized their OS was going nowhere, but for most of its lifetime, wasn't BBM only available on Blackberry devices?
I hope the same fate will happen to Facetime, iMessage and others.
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Firefox is still great. Especially on Android, since unlike Chrome, can still block ads.
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That is baloney. HTTP is used for a lot more than just web browsing.
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Netscape once ruled the Web, their development stagnated due to some internal issues which let IE take the lead. IE took over and had the perfect opportunity. They were the default browser on their own OS for many years (for better or worse, hence the antitrust lawsuits.) All they had to do in order to keep their lead was develop the features that web content developers and consumers wanted. They strayed away from that and it gave Mozilla the chance to take the lead, despite enjoying the Default status.
Re:Never understood single-vendor communication (Score:4, Interesting)
iMessage is mainly transparent. A lot of people don't even know that iMessage is underpinning their messages when they send "texts" to other people who are also using iOS / Mac devices. They just get the added benefits (encryption, delivered / read receipt, unlimited message length, etc, etc) without knowing how their message was delivered.
Re: Never understood single-vendor communication (Score:2)
Can't you also use it on a WiFi only iPad? And in this case you can only reach those on iMessage since you can't send SMS.
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But you forgot to say that your iPhone must be turned on and with cellular signal, and Internet. Why? Isn't your shiny Mac computer powerful enough to send a 256 byte message on its own?
One of the better features of being locked in Apple land
You should have said one more disadvantage of being vendor locked-in to Apple.
I can send/receive SMS just fine from any of my device using Google Voice and I don't need to fall back on my phone to do that. Plus, I am free to chose devices from just about any vendors.
But this is obviously a stop-gap. The goal is to move away
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Google does this for FREE you say? That's awesome.
Free!
It's a wonder they can stay in business.
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So it's not transparent. Imagine if every company was doing that. We would be stuck with hundreds of different, non-compatible, iMessage-like (SMS extender) and most of the time would fall back to SMS even if both devices are connected to the Internet, just because they don't want to share the access to the protocol. It makes no sense. Fortunately, email still works and is cross-platform.
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I guess I was taking "transparent" in the sense of the user experience. No, it's not an open protocol, but in practice, you don't need to do anything special to use it. It will auto-detect whether a message can be sent via its own service, and if not, then fall back to SMS without any intervention from the user.
The only reason it works, and doesn't fall back to SMS all the time is because it comes on every Apple device and they have a large enough market share. So, in that sense, it's not transparent. S
Good (Score:2)
Anything that's for good is good!
BlackBerry got a taste of the "Google experience" (Score:2, Insightful)
and in spite of our substantial efforts, users have moved on to other platforms, while new users proved difficult to sign on."
I think this statement describes Google with their [failed] messaging service. That is: -
Kill or ignore something that works by introducing another lame/unpolished/unfinished product;
Fail to attract new users while pissing off existing ones;
Then watch the product slide into irrelevance;
Repeat...
I know it's not easy to run big companies but how about common sense? Google & BlackBerry have a lot to learn from each other.
Too complicated (Score:3)
BBM made things much too complicated. WhatsApp uses phone #'s, Snap uses user names, Facebook / instagram use profiles, BBM used some randomly long string of characters that you had to try and share with others.
If you don't make it simple people don't want it.
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Cartoon (Score:2)
If I were a cartoonist, I'd draw a panel showing AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, etc, welcoming Blackberry Messenger into the gates of heaven.
Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory (Score:4, Insightful)
BBM was really big when Blackberry was part of the three-horse race between Microsoft and Palm. The problem is that they thought BBM would be the thing to keep them relevant, and refused to adapt. If BBM released back on iOS v2 after Apple added Exchange support, Blackberry could have charged $5 a year to have a BBM PIN for non-Blackberry devices and they would own the market and there would *be* no Whatsapp or Viber because BBM would own the data-based messaging market while still staying afloat because they'd be getting a tiny bit of money from millions of people.
By time they made BBM cross-platform, it was years after everyone had standardized on iMessage and Whatsapp. BBM tried to differentiate themselves by trying to throw iMessage into a blender with Snapchat and Skype and Discord. Every connection request I got was some spammer, and the content hubs had updates approximately once a month; never enough to make it worth opening the app. Push notifications were exclusively spam. The public chats either never had anyone in them, were related to sports teams that weren't popular in my area, or were filled with genuine trolls - I've literally had better discussion on BBSes within the past six months.
I probably *still* could have gotten some use out of it if they made a desktop application for it, like WhatsApp and Viber do, but the lack of even a browser-based portal made it annoying to use while at my desk since I couldn't alt-tab to it. The nail in the coffin through was Slack, and its clones Rocketchat, Mattermost, Hipchat, and even Trillian - every feature BBM had, the option to cloud-host or self-host, available on everything, and no answering the eternal question 'that's still a thing?'
The market was theirs to lose, and while they spent all their time blaming iMessage and Hangouts and Pingchat for their demise, they have nobody to blame but themselves. ...and yes, I'm one of the five people who are, in fact, upset about it.
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You missed my point. You didn't specify what the phone you had prior to your iPhone was, but RIM had about 20% of the smartphone market in 2008 - not an unstoppable force, but not Windows Phone 8, either. Even if you didn't use BBM, at the time, millions did. The allure of being able to continue to use BBM while also having an iPhone would have been meaningful for people who already owned Blackberries, but for individuals coming from feature phones or WinMo, you're right - it'd be a nonstarter unless one ha
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No. Just no. Blackberry became the de facto standard for business phones because they implemented a system where the company owning the phones could manage the messages and accounts of employees that were given the phones as employee phones. Totally different from iMessage where each individual phone user had exclusive and complete control over their messages. You remember how Apple refused to he
Its time came and went (Score:1)
It had its time and it went. I remember my company was 100% committed to BB, we had the internal servers, linked it all to Exchange, the works but then iPhones and Android offered the same features, more adaptable software the opportunity to write our own in-house apps. It was simply cheaper to switch everyone to iPhone or Android, easy to manage the infrastructure required to kit all the managers out with smartphones instead of BBs.