[mithrazor]

Around the time the co-CEO's were outed, the story was Jim Ballsille (spelling?) Wanted to market BBM as SMS 2.0 but Mike didn't want that.

Fast forward to 2017, that would have been a genius move that would have rendered iMessage, Whatsapp and the likes useless.

And to this day, Google's RCS still hasn't been able to get carriers to implement the protocol properly.

Everyone on Crackberry resented the idea of BBM going multiplatform. In hindsight, that was definitely the right idea.

[Troy Tiscareno]

It was a good idea... but it's FAR from unclear that the carriers would have been on board, because they already had SMS that made them lots of money and cost them almost nothing. Why give that away in return for something they have to pay BB for, especially ongoing payments? BB had a lot of leverage in the early 2000s to get carriers to pay them SAF for BIS, but by the late 2000s, BB had far less leverage, and the carriers were dying to kill those SAFs. Not sure they would have signed on for another one.

Carriers - US carriers in particular - want to own as much as they can for themselves. Getting them to give up any of their power is very difficult, and you have to have a TON of leverage to get that. Apple had it when they insisted on having direct control of the iPhone (no carrier bloatware, and direct software updates - BUT Apple also had a chain of stores in place to provide local support, and committed to providing it), but BB really didn't have any leverage at that time.

Had BB pushed for it back in, say, 2003-2004, then, yeah, they had leverage and maybe could have gotten it adopted, but Jim hadn't thought of it at that time, and BB would have been very against opening up BBM to everyone back then. They thought they'd wrapped up the smartphone market for good at that time...