Fate of BlackBerry's Popular Messaging Tool in Doubt
As the Smartphone's Sales Shrink, So Too Do Users' Contact Lists; Research In Motion Curtails Effort to License Service — Research In Motion Ltd. may have lost its dominance in the global smartphone market, but its instant-messaging service …
Context & Ripple Effects
RIM's messaging strategy was already under pressure from weakening handset momentum: BlackBerry sign-ups missed a target in 2008, and the company cut its forecast in 2009. A 2011 service disruption also triggered a user backlash over the outage, exposing how much the BlackBerry proposition depended on reliable communications as well as devices.
Curtailing BBM licensing removes a potential route to extend the service beyond BlackBerry handsets just as shrinking phone sales are eroding the contact networks that make a messaging platform useful.
First-order effects
- Prospective licensees lose RIM's actively pursued path to put BBM on their devices, leaving the service more dependent on BlackBerry handset sales.
- BlackBerry users face a smaller pool of reachable BBM contacts as the installed base contracts, reducing the service's practical value within RIM's own ecosystem.
Second-order effects
- Facebook and Twitter's BBM-connected apps have less distribution value if BBM cannot broaden beyond BlackBerry users, weakening RIM's effort to make the service a wider application layer.
- RIM must rely more heavily on its handset business to sustain BBM engagement after stepping back from licensing, rather than using the service to reach users on other devices.
Third-order effects
- The episode points to a structural constraint for proprietary messaging: a service tied to one declining device base can lose network value faster than the hardware business alone.
- If handset makers cannot separate their communications services from device sales, messaging increasingly favors platforms with broader distribution rather than single-vendor ecosystems.
The trend: Mobile messaging is becoming a distribution and network-effects business, making device-bound services vulnerable when their underlying handset base shrinks.