Research In Motion Ltd. may have lost its dominance in the global smartphone market, but its instant-messaging service is still widely popular around the world.
Now even that strong suit is threatening to weaken as world-wide sales of BlackBerrys falter and RIM softens efforts to leverage the messaging tool.
Teenagers still embrace BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM, for its quick and free instant messaging, and its easy-to-use contact list of friends. Security professionals—police, firefighters and ambulance drivers—have come to rely on it as one of the most dependable forms of electronic communications. There are more than 55 million BBM users today, up more than tenfold from the 5.3 million users in January 2009, according to RIM.
In that same time frame, RIM’s share of the U.S. smartphone market has dropped from more than 50% to less than 10%, according to research firm IDC. As BlackBerry users flock to Apple Inc.’s iPhone and devices powered by Google Inc.’s Android, they are also disappearing from the BBM contact list of their friends. That makes the service less useful, one dropped contact at a time.
Kady Hadesman, a 17-year-old BlackBerry user from Franklin, Mich., said she used to have over 100 BBM contacts, whom she messaged frequently to chat about school and gossip.
Now, she complains, “my [BBM contact] list is at 26.”
At the same time, a three-day RIM network outage across much of the world last fall has shaken confidence in BBM’s reliability. The service is also up against a host of new competitors, such as Apple’s iMessage and popular third-party messaging tools like WhatsApp Messenger, which can be used from most devices.
Any bigger push by RIM to leverage BBM, however, is taking a back seat to Chief Executive Thorsten Heins’s focus on pushing out the company’s new phone and operating system later this year, according to people familiar with the situation. A RIM spokeswoman said the company remains focused on, and is committed to, BBM and is “excited to bring new capabilities” to its user base.
That is a big shift from just a couple of months ago, when senior RIM executives were scrambling to figure out a way to capitalize on the popularity of the BBM service, these people said.
Executives came up with a specific BBM strategy that aimed to open up RIM’s proprietary network to other smartphone markers and carriers and license BBM as a service that could be used on a wide variety of devices including iPhones and Android phones, according to these people. The project was unofficially called “SMS 2.0” within the company, these people said.
While some within the company worried that licensing BBM to competitors would further diminish any incentive to buy a BlackBerry, others saw the project as a brand-recognition driver that would help the company stay relevant until its next line of phones launched.
RIM acquired a fast-growing New York-based messaging company called LiveProfile late last year as part of this strategy, according to people with knowledge of the deal. The small transaction wasn’t publicly disclosed. LiveProfile executives didn’t respond to requests to comment.
Associated PressThe BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM.
But after RIM’s two longtime chiefs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, stepped down in January, Mr. Heins, their handpicked successor, ended the BBM push, these people said. He decided RIM shouldn’t pursue licensing deals in general.
“It was not up for discussion,” one person familiar with the matter said.
BBM will appear on coming BlackBerry 10 phones, but RIM hasn’t revealed any changes to the service.
Still, RIM isn’t letting BBM fall by the wayside. Recently, the company launched a new BlackBerry model in India with a dedicated BBM key, a first for the company. Last month, the company rolled out several new applications that allow users to access and link to popular social network sites like Twitter and Foursquare from withinthe BBMservice.
A handful of third-party messenger services are crowding the market, each trying to differentiate themselves from platform-specific tools like BBM. The most popular, according to app downloading tracker AppAnnie, is WhatsApp. The start-up declined to provide user numbers, but it has been at or the near the top of app downloads for over a year now.
Another popular app is Touch, formerly called PingChat,an offering from parent company Enflick,also based in Canada, which started out as a simple messenger but is now trying to branch out into broader media communications. Italready has several million users.
The difference between all these tools is negligible. Some offer a free model and are testing out advertising schemes. Others, like WhatsApp, require a one-time sign-up fee and then provide ad-free messaging.
“I would say right now BBM is still number one (in the messaging space) just by virtue of being around longest,” said Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg. “The question now is what is RIM going to do with this? Can they maintain this as a defensible position, especially when others catch on?”
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