We’ve heard rumors that Research in Motion would license BlackBerry Messenger for use on non-BlackBerry platforms for some time.
A big part of former RIM co-CEO and board member, Jim Balsillie’s, plan for turning things around including licensing BBM and other proprietary services currently available only to BlackBerry users.
Even though RIM CEO Thorsten Heins is open to certain types of licensing deals with other hardware manufactures, it doesn’t look like BlackBerry Messenger is going cross platform anytime soon.
Even with BlackBerry market share sliding off of a cliff in recent times, BBM users have increased from 5.3 to 55 million users over the past three years.
BlackBerry Messenger is insanely popular and would do well on other platforms, however, it is one of the BlackBerry’s key differentiators from other platforms.
Thorsten Heins, for now, has decided to keep BlackBerry Messenger exclusive to BlackBerry users, but, I can easily see his stance changing depending on the adoption of BlackBerry 10…
[Via Venture Beat]
I am so glad that Balsillie didn’t get his way because opening up BBM to non BlackBerry users is the dumbest thing in the world
Although licensing BBM may not be the right move for RIM, I wouldn’t call it the dumbest thing in the world…
No matter how good BBM is, I will always need an alternative to it so long as it is limited to just BlackBerry users. The same goes for Facetime for iOS users.
Google and definitely Facebook have the ability to dwarf BBM numbers with cross platform IM clients conventional wisdom says that they both are working hard at making their cross platform offerings better…