Comments on: BlackBerry – Fidelity free zone

By: windsorr

windsorr — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 11:39:25 +0000

Good points…thanks Ramon. will take a look

By: Ramón

Ramón — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 20:01:40 +0000

I wrote a little piece on a far-fetched idea regarding this. What if BlackBerry uses this, coupled with later steps, to gradually build an offer by which carriers in developing countries can offer handsets from other vendors coupled with low-cost service plans, BIS style? Not sure it’s entirely feasible, but in any case I fully agree this strategy, however they plan to milk it out, applies only to emerging markets.

Here’s the piece URL: http://www.modelesis.com/?p=82

Regards,

Ramón

By: windsorr

windsorr — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 09:05:34 +0000

Yes you might very well be right. Everyone I know in the handset industry is looking for the head fake to try and keep users on the hardware. I think this issue goes back even further. Back in 2001 RIM was planning on being a software company. It could not et anyone to implement its solution so it became a hardware maker in order to get the software into the hands of users. That the problem with hardware. Once on you cant get off without a 90% decline in revs…eek!.

By: Francisco Kattan

Francisco Kattan — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 01:43:17 +0000

I think this move shows that Blackberry is internally conflicted about what business it wants to be in. Two years ago then RIM had a still thriving messaging business and a shrinking device market share. It was a good time to decide whether they were in the platform business or in the messaging business. Had they chosen to focus on messaging (and port their apps to other platforms), they had a great shot at becoming the leader in both enterprise messaging with push email and also consumer messaging (with BBM). However they chose to stick to their guns and focus on the platform. They continued to lose share on the platform and now have also lost their leadership in enterprise push email. Although BBM is still popular in emerging markets, apps like Whatsapp are quickly eroding its market share. The result: the worst of both worlds. BlackBerry is now an also-ran in both devices and messaging.

As you say, porting BBM is a very risky move. But some inside the company are probably arguing (correctly) that BBM by itself is not sufficient to keep users hostage to the platform, especially given options such as Whatsapp, iMessage, Hangouts, Skype, etc. etc. — and that it is better to hang on to users on BBM even as they move to other platforms perhaps for possible monetization later.

Over two years ago I wrote an article about this very issue:

http://franciscokattan.com/2011/03/20/is-rim-in-the-smartphone-business-or-the-messaging-business-time-to-decide/

In that article I showed (using a back of the envelope calculation) that RIM was generating as much (or more) margin from its messaging subscriptions than from device sales, and it was time to decide what business it wanted to be in: platforms or messaging. Now, two years later it’s too little too late to be playing this card.