Comment by vivalahn
12 hours ago
BBM itself should not have been a lock-in. It would have taken incredibly little effort to open it as a desktop messenger that can seamlessly interact with people who have BBM numbers for example.
I doubt they learned their lessons. Apple walked all over them in so many ways and, if memory serves me right, they even mocked Steve Jobs over the iPhone.
Edit: just so I’m clear I’m discussing it from the perspective of early to mid 2000s. iPhone hadn’t yet come out, but iPods were popular. Trillian and Pidgin were dominating the online landscape of software that could support multiple chat protocols - seamless ICQ, AIM, IRC, Yahoo, MSN Messenger, all in one program. If there was a time for RIM to corner the market here it was right then and there because BBM was the real deal, being available on phones and they could have signed agreements with others to bring it to, for example, Nokia and Motorola and whoever else.
But no. They’d rather be arrogant and stupid.
> they even mocked Steve Jobs over the iPhone.
Isn't that just doing their jobs as executives for a competitor?
Though internally, one would hope they were sounding some alarm bells. Though at the time, it wasn't at all obvious that people could get used to doing relatively serious typing on a small (even tiny back then) virtual keyboard.
Time after time we believe people in important places have some higher knowledge or some deeper insight. However, more likely, they were just regular people who were in the right place at the right time. I don't think they understood what they were up against. Neither did Nokia / Microsoft with Windows Phone.