BlackBerry Delays Launch of BBM Apps For iOS, Android 54
USA Today reports: "BlackBerry on Saturday hit pause on the rollout of iPhone and Android apps for its popular BlackBerry Messenger mobile social messaging service after an unreleased version of the Android app was posted online. That version saw 1.1 million active users in the first 8 hours, the company said, but the unofficial version "caused issues," which the company continued to address throughout the day. The company did not specify what the issues were."
At least it's a business plan (Score:5, Insightful)
Transitioning from hardware/software company to software company making products for former competitor's hardware is at least a business plan, which is more than RIM has had for years.
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He didn't say it was a good plan.
Re:At least it's a business plan (Score:5, Insightful)
If by business plan you mean to follow the plan of mostly destroying your company by releasing hardware 2 years late. then making a complete bollocks of releasing what's left that's worth saving, vis a vis BBM, yeah it's a plan...
But at least they're consistent.
No they have two more thing of value that everyone else in the mobile world would pay through the nose for;
1. Patents lots and lots of patent on smart phones and mobile devices.
2. They also have a brand recognition and reputation in the corporate/government world that any company would love to have.
Whoever ends up buying the blackberry name will when the enterprise game. I look for a bidding war in the next year between Microsoft Google Apple and possible Samsung over Blackberry's patent profile and the trademark. Whoever gets the name will probably use it as their branding for their enterprise line of phones, and whoever gets the patent will have a war chest that they will be able to brow beat the competition into submission with.
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Whoever ends up buying the blackberry name will when the enterprise game.
The enterprise game has already started. It's a matter of how they'll make use of the Blackberry name, not when.
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It would be a very smart buy for Microsoft and considering they are sitting on 77 billion in cash they could easily do it.
Add BB to their Nokia purchase and they would become a real force to be reckoned with in the SmatPhone market.
As long as they get rid of Balmer of course :)
Buying more crap will do nothing. Sure they get the patents but without a decent product they won't make a profit.
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> 2. They also have a brand recognition and reputation in the corporate/government world that any company would love to have.
Except for the most die-hard, must control absolutely everything, BB has been losing share to iOS and Android for quite some time. And the Playbook and BBOS10, they shot their reputation for quality in the foot. Mediocre hardware, with a slow, buggy OS slapped on it, that clearly was incomplete and not ready for general use when it shipped [but which they had to ship, just to hav
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with a slow, buggy OS slapped on it
Haha!
No.
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Haha!
Yes.
http://blackberryq10.tumblr.com/ [tumblr.com]
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They still have the market for people that demand a physical keyboard cornered. Unfortunately, that is only a couple of percentage of the smartphone market, and shrinking daily.
Don't know about that. BlackBerry remains shockingly popular among teens and twenty somethings that primarily use their phone for social networking (i.e. typing). The phone is still well respected among them and given that BlackBerry doesn't even market to them or include good features for them, that says something. I don't know
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My guess is that's only the ones that haven't discovered Swype or similar keyboards. The text entry speed is incredible.
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Well, you're not incorrect technically, but haven't you wondered why everyone is so afraid of buying them?
Blackberry's assets [financialpost.com] are far beyond their current $4.5 billion market cap [google.ca], so technically if you sold all their pieces you'd get more than what you'd pay in stock for the company.
The reason nobody is buying them is because they are losing $1 billion per quarter [financialpost.com], and it would cost almost $2 billion to shutdown the hardware manufacturing unit. So let's say you pay $5 billion for the company, and you sell o
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What is the point of brand recognition when they are being outsold in the market?
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Bullshit, the reason why BB is on the ropes is they no longer HAVE the enterprise customers, BYOD killed BB dead and all those PHBs that had to have a crackberry now have an iPhone or Android.
Lets face it the only ones that would be interested in buying BB is patent trolls and the big three who could use those patents against the competition. Since MSFT gets paid for every android sold thanks to patents my money would be on them buying it but it sure won't be for the customers, it'll be for the patents.
BYOD is nothing but a time bomb waiting to happen. I a bring your own device environment there is nothing to the IT department can do to insure security every device allowed in not configured the the company IT department is another potential back-door into the companies network. I am just waiting to see the explosion that happens when there is a massive leak of customer data and it is tracked back to a BYOD policy.
The problem is Average Joe User is a ignorant moron that click OK to every prompt and install
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They had a business plan. Create a phone that was better than Android and iOS for their existing base. They sort of failed but they had a plan.
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I don't think you can package a time machine in an apk.
Re: link to apk? (Score:1)
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Dead man tries to walk, trips and falls... (Score:2, Interesting)
The one part of Blackberry's business that might be attractive to an outside buyer is its secure email hosting. If they can't even get that right with iOS & Android apps, what's left? Truly this is a zombie company with both of its arms falling off. The demise of BB hardware could be blamed in part to 'market forces,' but BB has no one to blame for the failure of its software developers and managers.
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No it isn't (Score:2)
Secure email hosting is not worth anyone buying because so many other competitors can do it. It's not rocket science to run an IMAP or Exchange server.
The one piece of IP BLackberry has that someone is going to buy and roll out as a going concern is their Mobile Device Management platform, Blackberry Fusion. Not a lot of people know this exists because it is not a piece of consumer-facing technology, but Blackberry has a very excellent cross-device MDM platform that can manage and provision Android, iPhone,
Unspecified issues (Score:1)
The unspecified issues is that their infrastructure can't handle that many users.
Don't forget to tip your waiter!
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In a world where your phone can just talk to the mail/XMPP/whatever server like the real computer that it is, having a fancy extra transmogrification lay
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On iOS you have iCloud
On Android you have Google services
Everyone is doing MDM
There is plenty of play for that intermediate layer. I can easily see a 2013 version of BES being an amazing feature that people would flock to the phone for. The problem is BlackBerry doesn't have that. They have a 2005 version of BES slightly updated.
unofficial version "caused issues," (Score:2)
If BBM is so popular... (Score:2)
If BBM is so popular... why are they laying off 4,000 people?
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they don't need 4000 people to support BBM??
It must not be that popular, then. If a billion people were using it, like iOS, they'd likely need more than 4,000 people to support it.
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They had 20,000 employees a few years ago. How many does Google or Apple have? Hint, a lot fewer.
Really? Google and Apple have fewer than 20,000 employees? Thats not true at all. In fact it is easy to prove that the above statement is utterly false. A simple wikipedia look up would show you that, as of March 2013, Google employs nearly 45,000 people and Apple employs 80,000. Meanwhile BlackBerry/RIMM had 12,700 back in March, before this recent layoff will go into effect.
You don't have to take wikipedia's word for it though. For a publicly traded company this information is available in the respective
Surprise Surprise (Score:3)
Seppuku (Score:1)
I must say, it's noble of RIM to give their existing customers a better way of smoothly transitioning from their existing platform to Android or iOS.
Sabotage? (Score:5, Interesting)
The conspiracy theorist ideas inside me tell me sabotage may be involved. I don't buy that a beta version caused server issues that prompted to halt the rollout.
40% of the company was canned.
The ios version (which i got by creating an Australia account) also had issues with connecting, which is expected. I don't think Blackberry was ready for this.
Way to go with the old customers Blackberry (Score:2)
So if you have an android or an iPhone you get BB messenger for free but if you have an actual blackberry device without BB data plan then no BB messenger for you.
Way to go with the old customers Blackberry.
The least you could do was allow BB messenger without BB data plan.