[@3iza]

Really interesting and different point of view. It's a bit long though. Source

[howarmat]

not a bad read....thanks for sharing!

[Alex_Hong]

Interesting read. thanks for sharing OP.

[crackcookie]

Here it is sans link, it is a very insightful article, that sadly, we don't get much of anymore, instead the most popular articles are doom and gloom instead of insight and though provoking ones.

Cross Platform BBM: Looking at the bigger picture.
Supersanusi May 16, 2013 Editorial, Opinion


The biggest news from the BlackBerry Live keynote on Tuesday was definitely the announcement that BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) was going to be available to iOs and Android devices for free starting this summer. Almost as soon as we tweeted that on our Live tweet (which made the big screen at BBLive by the way–Woohoo!) my mailbox and twitter lit up with requests for me to share my thoughts on the issue. So here goes.

I’m pretty sure the first thing that came to many minds would have been that BlackBerry had committed suicide of sorts (and maybe they have, who knows? Only time would tell for sure), Why would BlackBerry open up its most prized possession to competitors (android and iOs) who are larger and doing way better than it is at the moment? Doesn’t seem like there is any sense in it or is there?

Maybe there is.
Just over a year ago, not long after Thorsten Heins took over as BlackBerry CEO I, Babse and David (AWOL writers here), had a discussion similar to this. at the time, one of the Directors and co-Founder of BlackBerry Jim Balsillie had left the company and sold his shares. The gist was that he had suggested that BlackBerry dump their hardware business and instead, focus on being a service by opening up BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) as a whole to other devices and then get a commission of the service as they do for BlackBerry devices. His reasoning was that BlackBerry wasn’t making any money off hardware or software any longer (In fact their hardware division was running at a loss, and BYOD concept had started getting into the enterprise market, so the demand for BES licenses had reduced to an extent) and the bulk of the money being made was from BES and BIS service charges.

The danger in this idea was three-fold, firstly, BlackBerry’s has a largely loyal user-base. I doubt many other companies can get away and survive for this long with the type of behavior they exhibited pre- Thorstein–multiple product delays, slow response to competition, uncompetitive products etc. Such a move, would be alienating the last bit of customers who have kept faith in the brand for so long. Getting a new market base from scratch for a brand being dragged in the mud at that time would have been pretty difficult.

Secondly, after spending all that money developing the BlackBerry 10 OS which they had already stated they were open to licensing out to other OEMs, adopting the service only strategy Jim suggested would mean shelving the OS and throwing away all their investments in that regard, because the only way another OEM would consider licensing it was if the platform had proven to be up to scratch and in demand. No one would license stuff the owner wasn’t going to invest in themselves.

Thirdly, it would leave all their revenue in the hands of networks. BIS may be advantageous to the networks in terms of speed and congestion because of BIS’ data compression, but in the long run, networks make less money on BlackBerry plans than they would on regular data plans seeing as they have to share the payments for BlackBerry plans with BlackBerry. And without putting hardware out, the network’s need for BlackBerry service reduces especially when they can make more money by offering their data directly. So why would a network choose to make less money when they can make more?

At the time I had the above discussion, I was of the opinion that they could open up BBM and BlackBerry service only when BlackBerry 10 was a proven success and they had gained back some traction. Is BlackBerry 10 already a proven success? It’s hard to tell, mostly because I think it’s still early days. Asides the fact that they were able to return to profitability after offering the Z10 for just half a quarter is all the information I have, and even that could be a one off. It’s still too early to tell, ideally it would take a couple of quarters to tell if BlackBerry 10 is a success or not, It most likely would do well at first as a lot of individuals AKA “BlackBerry People” (a bit more on this below) and companies that swear by their BlackBerry devices replace the old ones, the key point for it to succeed would be whether it is able to attract new users, that haven’t used BlackBerry before. As at their last earnings they said 55% of their Z10 sales were to non-BlackBerry users…so maybe they are attracting those users already, they have data, we don’t. Till I can see that data, I’ll still feel it’s too early to say.



Now to the heart of the matter. What possible reasons are there for BBM to go cross platform? In one word revenue. I’ll explain.
As far as I’m concerned, BlackBerry’s “fall” from the top revolved around their inability to define themselves, instead, they tried to be everything everyone else was or what they thought everyone else wanted them to be. They tried to make everyone happy instead of focusing on their strengths. After the iPhone launch in 2007 rather than try to focus on a product which would further differentiate the iconic BlackBerry brand and create its own space, they launched the Storm hurriedly as a response. It was the first BlackBerry model I skipped. I thought it was awful. They never really did recover from the storm. And they kept slipping, they pushed their legacy OS, stretched it past its limit by adding new features to try and compete with newer, more modern Oses, and truth be told, the fact that they were able to get some of the features on the legacy OS knowing what it started out to be, is a testament to the brilliance of their software team. BlackBerry may have been in a stronger position (emphasis on may) if they had focused on being a brutally efficient communication tool, with kick-*** battery-life while building a new OS to compete in the background. But that’s in the past.

Since Thorsten took over, he has harped on a few things over and over again, “focus”, “mobile computing”, “BlackBerry people”, etc. I think Blackberry wants to own the mobile computing space and to do that, they need to get on a huge number of mobile devices (and they are doing so via their Enterprise device management solutions and now BBM for starters, who knows maybe more later). They aren’t trying to be another Apple or Google (at least in the short-term) rather they are becoming their own identity, owning their brand, creating their own space. They market BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry as a whole now as “for BlackBerry people” (i.e “hyper connected”, multi-tasking, ambitious, < insert marketing jargon here> etc, You can watch this video here where Thorsten first used and explained the term). I’m pretty sure it could have been easy to put a home button on BlackBerry devices like every other OS does, but they chose not to, they chose to try and shift the paradigm away from buttons and going in and out of apps, to a more modern gesture based flow and it does work. It may not be for everyone though…at least not right away. They are focused at a particular set of people–a particular set of “BlackBerry People” who would use BlackBerry regardless of whether BBM is there or not. The selling point for these isn’t BBM, it could be security, or the “flow”, or the OS level integration 3rd party apps can access, or maybe the multi-tasking or even just plain sentiment. They estimate they can be profitable by focusing on that subset of the market alone (at least in the short-term) and they may be right, just selling 1 million Z10s took them out of the red.

Are they losing money off the people who don’t get the next BlackBerry or ditch the platform because of BBM? Yes…and no, not really. How so you ask? Those people who need BlackBerry devices for BBM alone mostly aren’t buying new BlackBerry devices just for BBM, they keep their old ones. Like seriously, what percentage of BlackBerry users who use the device for ONLY BBM, would shell out N98,000 or N120,000 for a Z10 or Q10 respectively? Not a significant percentage in my opinion. The money BlackBerry makes of these would be about 30% of their monthly subscriptions that would be about N300 or N450).

Now that percentage that keep BlackBerry devices just for BBM hurt the BlackBerry brand in a sense. They expect everything on every other platform to get on their phones, they can’t have that, so they aren’t satisfied…they complain and tarnish the brand’s image. By letting them go and still offering them the one thing they want from BlackBerry as a whole…for free, Blackberry would have in one single move, set in motion a chain of events that would better the brand image (less slander by unsatisfied users) and widened the brand’s reach. BBM is arguably heads and shoulders better and more efficient than most other IM clients, If the adoption is high, do you know how much free marketing it would be for BlackBerry if BBM is one of the top apps on Apple’s app store and Google Play? This brand laundering and marketing is way more valuable than the N300 – N450 per month revenue they would otherwise have made from the same people.

Still on those customers that ditch the platform, BlackBerry still does retain them via BBM they aren’t lost totally per se, BBM can be monetized in several ways down the road, services like the already running BBM money (a mobile money service that runs on BBM in Indonesia), the just announced BBM channels and other services possibly in the pipeline that run on BBM as a platform could be a new source of service revenue to replace the old sources (BES and BIS subscriptions which have been going down because, first you if you don’t need high grade security and control as an enterprise, you can use Microsoft Exchange server for the new BlackBerry devices from which BlackBerry makes no service revenue and BIS plans are now low cost, so less money is made there as well). So a new stream of revenue and a laundered brand in one move.

Lastly, while all this is going on, the BlackBerry 10 ecosystem is developing and inching closer to the big 2 ecosystems (iOs and Android), Big apps and games are there now (Skype, Ruzzle, Kindle, Tunein radio, Evernote, Dropbox, Keek, Asphalt 7, Modern combat 4 etc) are there now, more are coming (there’s a leaked beta of instagram floating about), exclusives like Blaq (which is now my favorite twitter client on any platform) are there as well. You are even beginning to get situations where top apps (e.g Animoog) from the number one ecosystem (iOs), skip android and are available on BlackBerry first. Even developers like Songza who first offered their app as an android port are now developing a fully native BlackBerry 10 version after seeing strong demand from the platform.

So there is definitely some traction there. If that traction proves to be long term and BBM gets successful on the other platforms in the future, offering exclusive features and better experiences on BlackBerry could also be a tool to win back customers to their hardware. This may sound far fetched (it actually IS far fetched) but it could one day get to the point where it becomes, “the only reason I have an iOs/android device is because of the apps, I can get a better experience, integration (read this) AND those apps on BlackBerry 10.

Or maybe not. Time would tell.