Rather than obsoleting themselves the way Apple does, by creating ever more modern products themselves, they use every means, legit and beyond shady at their disposal, to scour our devices for trends, and then buy companies before they can become real competition. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg loves his big blue app and all, but Facebook understands specific services aren't their business. And Apple is really good at cannibalizing and obsoleting themselves before someone else can do it to them. it was personal computing devices and content. That's because Apple's business was never iPods and Macs or iTunes Music. Instead of riding iTunes Music into the ground, they launched Apple Music. Instead of protecting the iPod and the Mac, Apple pushed ahead with iPhone and iPad. Historically, Apple doesn't mistake their products for their business. And there's little chance it'll surpass the value of the iPhone business any time soon. iMessage is just one messaging service in a highly fragmented market.
Should that be a warning to Apple and iMessage? BBM was the market leader and eventually, its value surpassed the value of BlackBerry's handset business. The vast majority of their customers had already left BlackBerry, in spite of BBM, and, since they weren't able to take it with them, they simply left BBM behind.Īnd there was no amount of stickiness that could stop that. Sure, BlackBerry eventually took BBM cross-platform, but even though they had to struggle to work around their single-device PIN-based architecture in a multi-device world, that ended up being the least of their problems. It never occurred to them that their messaging could become more valuable than their handsets.īlackBerry fell to a valuation of around $5 billion where WhatsApp, a cross-platform clone of BBM that basically ripped and repeated feature after feature and shipped it for every phone it could find, ended up selling to Facebook for three times that.
They still saw their messaging as a way to keep people locked to their handsets. They were seemingly afraid that if they let their messaging system go, their customers would go with it. There was talk of BlackBerry taking BBM cross-platform but nothing ever came of it. Anyone who wanted a high power job, and anyone who wanted to be with someone who had a high power job, needed to be on BBM.īy 2010, however BlackBerry's handsets had fallen behind iPhone and Android. And those two things, their handset popularity and their messaging popularity, were inextricably linked. By 2006, BlackBerry was an incredibly popular handset manufacturer with an incredibly popular messaging service. Evolving from the pager, it grew to support email first, then BBM - BlackBerry Messenger. Once upon a time, BlackBerry was in a similar situation. That adds to both the value of Apple's platform and the stickiness.īut how long does that value last? Or, better said: when does that value transition from the platform to the service? The BBM bust It might as well have been the Eloi and the Morlochs.
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Everyone else, whether from a flip phone or Android phone, got a green bubble.īlues and Greens. Anyone who messaged you from another Apple device got a cool blue bubble. The on-boarding was… was literally no on boarding. If you used text messaging on iPhone, you used the Messages app, and if you used the Messages app with another Apple user, you used iMessage. The first was how seamlessly Apple integrated iMessage with SMS. Yeah, that whole thing was the genius play.