surprised on Tuesday with an announcement on its developer conference. The company announced it would open its popular instant messaging service BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) to rival platforms. A historic decision for a company that since its founding maintained a closed environment, similar to Apple. Specifically, announced that one of its BBM-technological jewels, hitherto available only to their own terminals, can be used from this summer on smartphones with Apple’s iOS operating system and Google’s Android. This means that soon Blackberry users can chat with their friends who have iPhones or smart phone that works with the green robot software through courier Canadian firm.
A wise decision or an error in Blackberry? Since the company claims that this was the time to open the service to others, among other things, insisted, because users have long suing. But beyond that argument, as it looks like a flight forward, for no one is aware that apps like WhatsApp (about 200 million active users worldwide), Line (with 140 million registered users), WeChat (over 300 registered), or Microsoft’s own Skype are taking very strong positions in a market, the IM-communications key present and future. So it seems that Blackberry has not been one to take their chat service to other platforms. Question of survival.
In this context, the decision of the Canadian manufacturer of mobile looks good. Another question is whether this defensive strategy and openness is capable of stealing part of the instant messaging market listed companies. They and others who also want to point to this trend, such as Google, today announced the launch of Babel.
BlackberryEverything points to try to play some tricks that have given prestige to their messaging service, such as security (precisely WhatsApp is criticized the lack of it) and will seek to maintain its strength especially with Blackberry Messenger markets where the company still has some leadership and in some Latin American countries.
doubt arises whether Blackberry is late with its policy of BBM platform and if this step the company boost sales of its smartphones or, conversely, lose their mobile customers now that users are able to enjoy the service on models from other manufacturers. A real risk, but that seems to be running if he wants to be a major player in the mobile industry. Blackberry, which was a leader in smartphones , does not appear today in the top 5 global manufacturers and operating system-which recently released version 10 – closed the first quarter with a share of 3% against 6.8% it had in the same period last year, according to Gartner.
Apart from this, the company does seem to have hit a plenary to launch a mobile phone, the Blackberry Q5, emerging markets and companies, where the U.S. manufacturer may have more travel.
No comments:
Post a Comment