BlackBerry Delays Launch of BBM Apps For iOS, Android

USA Today reports: "BlackBerry on Saturday hit pause on the rollout of iPhone and Android apps for its popular BlackBerry Messenger mobile social messaging service after an unreleased version of the Android app was posted online. That version saw 1.1 million active users in the first 8 hours, the company said, but the unofficial version "caused issues," which the company continued to address throughout the day. The company did not specify what the issues were."

Comments

At least it's a business plan

[hessian]

Transitioning from hardware/software company to software company making products for former competitor's hardware is at least a business plan, which is more than RIM has had for years.

Re:At least it's a business plan

[lister king of smeg]

If by business plan you mean to follow the plan of mostly destroying your company by releasing hardware 2 years late. then making a complete bollocks of releasing what's left that's worth saving, vis a vis BBM, yeah it's a plan...

But at least they're consistent.

No they have two more thing of value that everyone else in the mobile world would pay through the nose for;

1. Patents lots and lots of patent on smart phones and mobile devices.
2. They also have a brand recognition and reputation in the corporate/government world that any company would love to have.

Whoever ends up buying the blackberry name will when the enterprise game. I look for a bidding war in the next year between Microsoft Google Apple and possible Samsung over Blackberry's patent profile and the trademark. Whoever gets the name will probably use it as their branding for their enterprise line of phones, and whoever gets the patent will have a war chest that they will be able to brow beat the competition into submission with.

Re:At least it's a business plan

[SeaFox]

Whoever ends up buying the blackberry name will when the enterprise game.

The enterprise game has already started. It's a matter of how they'll make use of the Blackberry name, not when.

Re:At least it's a business plan

[lister king of smeg]

Bullshit, the reason why BB is on the ropes is they no longer HAVE the enterprise customers, BYOD killed BB dead and all those PHBs that had to have a crackberry now have an iPhone or Android.

Lets face it the only ones that would be interested in buying BB is patent trolls and the big three who could use those patents against the competition. Since MSFT gets paid for every android sold thanks to patents my money would be on them buying it but it sure won't be for the customers, it'll be for the patents.

BYOD is nothing but a time bomb waiting to happen. I a bring your own device environment there is nothing to the IT department can do to insure security every device allowed in not configured the the company IT department is another potential back-door into the companies network. I am just waiting to see the explosion that happens when there is a massive leak of customer data and it is tracked back to a BYOD policy.

The problem is Average Joe User is a ignorant moron that click OK to every prompt and installs everything with the word free in it. Average Joe actual does believe every Nigerian prince, installs every "Fr33!!!! fonts and 1337 Smiliez pack!!!!.exe, and would find nothing suspicious in nor have problem executing a file named;

~TILDE/PUB/CIA-BIN/ETC/INIT.DLL?FILE=__AUTOEXEC.BAT.MY%20OSX%20DOCUMENTS-INSTALL.EXE.RAR.INI.TAR.DOÇX.PHPHPHP.XHTML.TML.XTL.TXXT.0DAY.HACK.ERS_(1995)_BLURAY_CAM-XVID.EXE.TAR.[SCR].LISP.MSI.LNK.ZDA.GNN.WRBT.OBJ.O.H.SWF.DPKG.APP.ZIP.TAR.TAR.CO.GZ.A.OUT.EXE.

That is why the a good IT department locks down the living hell out of every pc on their network. Allowing average joe to a have access to sensitive data on unsecured untrusted easily compromised systems is a bad bad idea. The PHB's will in a while see that there short sided idea of BYOD saving money will cost them painfully, and will eventually look to fix the problem and remember centrally administered black berries didn't have these problems.

Surprise Surprise

[Murdoch5]

They wonder why they have to lay 4500 people off. This is exactly how Blackberry works, they set a deadline and then miss it completely.

Re:If BBM is so popular...

[Anonymous Coward]

They had 20,000 employees a few years ago. How many does Google or Apple have? Hint, a lot fewer.

Really? Google and Apple have fewer than 20,000 employees? Thats not true at all. In fact it is easy to prove that the above statement is utterly false. A simple wikipedia look up would show you that, as of March 2013, Google employs nearly 45,000 people and Apple employs 80,000. Meanwhile BlackBerry/RIMM had 12,700 back in March, before this recent layoff will go into effect.

You don't have to take wikipedia's word for it though. For a publicly traded company this information is available in the respective company's 10-K filings with the SEC. In Google's 2012 10-K filing they reported 53,861 employees with 19,746 in R&D. In Apple's 2012 10-K filing they reported 72,800 employees and 3300 temps and contractors (Apple did not provide an R&D headcount). In BlackBerry/RIMM's 2012 10-K they listed 16,500 employees with 6100 of those employees in R&D. New 10-K filings should be pubic next month and I would imagine that those numbers are going to be closer to what is listed in wikipedia.

In short, last year Google had more R&D staffing than Blackberry/RIMM in total headcount (Administrative, Sales, Marketing, IT, and R&D). Apple was over 4x the size of BlackBerry last year, and if the numbers on wikipedia are accurate, Apple will be nearly 10x the size of BlackBerry/RIMM when this round of layoffs are over.

I still find it amazing that with the information we have available at our fingertips, people still just make stuff like this up on the fly without any fact checking whatsoever.

Sabotage?

[Espectr0]

The conspiracy theorist ideas inside me tell me sabotage may be involved. I don't buy that a beta version caused server issues that prompted to halt the rollout.

40% of the company was canned.

The ios version (which i got by creating an Australia account) also had issues with connecting, which is expected. I don't think Blackberry was ready for this.

Re:Unspecified issues

[jbolden]

On iOS you have iCloud
On Android you have Google services
Everyone is doing MDM

There is plenty of play for that intermediate layer. I can easily see a 2013 version of BES being an amazing feature that people would flock to the phone for. The problem is BlackBerry doesn't have that. They have a 2005 version of BES slightly updated.