Is BlackBerry making the right move with BBM?

Giving BBM for free to iOS and Android means killing the sole remaining novelty of BlackBerry that still attracts some consumers to buy the phones

What are the reasons for BlackBerry’s popularity? Email, the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and QWERTY keyboard.

Why has BlackBerry crashed on the popularity charts during the past years? Because it couldn’t catch-up with the competition. Employers stopped asking employees to use a BlackBerry for official emails and the floodgates were opened to connect any device on to the company’s enterprise servers. Who won? iPhone.

What’s left? BBM and QWERTY.

Let’s look at QWERTY first. How many mobiles phones do you remember that were launched in the recent past with a physical QWERTY keyboard present? Nokia Asha series and BlackBerry Q10? Mobile companies across the world have moved consumers on to the full screen displays and most don’t seem to be complaining. And those who still love the physical keyboard on their phones do have a couple of options, including BlackBerry. But with BlackBerry’s effort to give itself a new life with a new operating software termed at BB 10, the first phone that came out of the stable was indeed BlackBerry Z10 -- minus a physical display. And the near diabolical death of BlackBerry has shown how consumers don’t really care about the physical keyboard anymore. Those who do, aren’t sufficient to tide the boat.

This brings us the the third and the most important novelty that BlackBerry offers. The BlackBerry Messenger. Or popularly known as the BBM.

There is  no possibility of a debate on the popularity of the BBM and the BBM PINs. They were in vogue a couple of years ago and the moment someone saw another person with a BlackBerry the first itch was to share the BBM PIN and start talking. There are hardcore BBM fans and they still swear by the messenger.

When the BlackBerry ship started to sink a few years ago there was a growing talk and pressure on BlackBerry to make the BBM available to iOS and Android. The company did not budge. Then came the new age messengers like WhatsApp, iMessage, and many others.

To understand the popularity of WhatsApp, the noun is now used as a verb. ‘WhatsApp me.’ ‘I will WhatsApp you.’ A crown earlier sitting pretty on the forehead of BBM.

Now, BlackBerry has decided to launch the messenger for iOS and Android platforms. Does that leave BlackBerry with any novelty factor?

Employers and employees don’t need to have a BlackBerry to be connected to their enterprise servers. QWERTY has a limited fan following left which is insufficient to push sales. BBM will soon be present on iPhone and Android.

So why should one get a BlackBerry in this age? For the new BB 10 OS? Hardly, in my opinion.

Till now BlackBerry hasn’t made it clear how it will make money with the BBM. To begin with, the messengers could have been ‘purchased’ from the Apple App Store and Google Play. But the company ruled that out completely. It said that the difference between a WhatsApp and  BBM is that BBM is going to be free.

That makes a ‘subscription-based’ model for BBM users on iOS and Android out of question.

‘In-app’ advertisement? A possibility but that will greatly compromise the BBM experience and will put off consumers. Also, with the success of WhatsApp we  have seen that consumers are ready to pay upfront or use it for a year and then pay for a year's subscription.

Google will also be launching Babel, its new messenger service that is likely to unify all its chat platforms like Google Talk, Google Plus’ Messenger, Google Hangouts and others. With the unified service available on mobile phones, it will surely be a worthy challenger to other messenger services.

How BlackBerry will monetise BBM remains to be seen. For the time being, giving away BBM for free to iOS and Android means killing the sole remaining novelty of BlackBerry that still attracts some consumers to buy the phones. That will now be gone very soon.