Version History: BlackBerry Messenger

22:15I don't know that I'm going to do a good job of explaining. So let me just play a clip from TechRadar from, I think, 2011, where they actually got a hands-on with the thing. For a monthly fee of$4.99, which is around£3, BlackBerry users will have unlimited access to 50 personally selected songs, and then once every four weeks, you'll be able to change 25 tracks on your list. Now, this doesn't sound like a great deal on its own. It doesn't. But what will pull in users is the ability to access all 50 songs on each of your BBM platforms. Why are you trying to make it sound good? But beware to choose your music carefully.

22:49The idea is that you create a personal music profile with your chosen songs that other people can browse through. So you might want to think, This is just hell. Look at this pan. Or no, it's not a pan. She's pushing the phone into the shot. She's holding it around. So thank you, TechRadar. Don't move the camera. Yeah, that's an old TechRadar video. And I just have to say that you can tell there was like a PR person standing over the shoulder because they had to make it sound somewhat reasonable. All of that is hell on earth. That's not an ad? No. That was a review? Yeah. Oh. It's completely true.

23:21She was definitely like at a launch event holding the phone, and there are three comms people standing behind. We've all been through this. It's awful. And eventually you become a sociopath, and you're like, I don't care what you think. But early on, you're like, yeah, I think they'll sell it to some people who will think this is a good idea. And the camera guy or camera woman could not move, and so she had to pan the phone up into the— I just know I've made that video. I have a lot of sympathy for how that video is produced. And you're just like, this is the stupidest idea in the world. $4.99 a month?

23:48Yeah. For 50 songs you have to pick? If I understand it correctly, you got to have 50 songs in your library. And then you could browse your friends' libraries and listen to their songs too. So the only way to make your library bigger was to access all of your friends' libraries. But then at the end, just like random strays at Justin Bieber, that it's like hide your Justin Bieber songs so that your friends can't listen to them. Like, I would like to listen to Justin Bieber on my friend's playlist. Okay. A lot of questions there. I just want to, once again, offer some context to the group. The iPod existed during this time.

24:21Super existed. This was their attempt not to compete with the future iPhone or whatever. They were like, the way we're going to get the iPod is by charging$5 a month for you to have 50 songs that change every month. and you have to operate this database. And meanwhile, people are like, what I'm going to do is open up Napster on my desktop computer and put five billion songs in my iPod for free. I remember trying to make my BlackBerry like an iPhone and I would sideload music onto my BlackBerry. And it was a terrible experience. So this was BlackBerry being like, you no longer have to put music on a micro SD card or whatever card it was, or use a micro USB cord to sideload from your BBM desktop app.

25:13I did these things. Young Joanna did these things. Okay? This was their solution to that. We will let you get the music through our store. Yeah. We were so far behind. Us BlackBerry people, we were just trying to keep up. No, they just knew that you were rich East Coasters and they could milk you for five extra dollars. You already had an iPad. By this point, it wasn't just rich East Coasters. There were the Canadians. The Canadians. That's true. There were the rich Canadians. There were the rich people in Hollywood. Yeah, there were wealthy finance pros all over the world. All over the world.

25:45People are BBMing. And they don't want to go to the iPhone yet because it's not on Verizon. It's not on – Or any other carrier, really. I mean, they started launching internationally when? Right at the beginning. So, yeah. It was first on AT &T and then they started adding markets. So, we are stuck. We are stuck with BlackBerry. And so here comes BBM music,$4.99 a month. And by the way, it's a BBM thing, which I think is really interesting. And so this is the thing. They knew they couldn't do anything. They had to put it into BBM. Right. BBM was BlackBerry's last move, which I thought was so interesting.

26:17It's like the, because at this point, you're right. Like we're. It was the stickiness. Exactly right. You know what else would have been sticky? Taping an iPod Nano to the back of your BlackBerry. A choice you could have made at any time. I did that. I was that person. I had the BlackBerry. Like I said, I'm sideloading music to the BlackBerry, but it's not working very well. Did you have the gadget pockets? Like you would like come home at the end of the night and you'd like take out your digital camera and your phone and your iPod? I was a woman, so I had a bag. Sure, yeah. Remember the HTC rhyme?

26:44They made that phone for me. They made phones for women back then. So, but like I, this was me. Like I, and so maybe I paid for BBM music. I'm not, I'm not ashamed to say I might have. You probably did. But before, so this, this is the turning point, right? because this is where, actually, I think it was 2010 that for the first time in several years, BlackBerry stopped being the best-selling smartphone brand. That was the year that Android in particular really, really just left it behind. But real quick, before we get away from peak BlackBerry, let me just show you a bunch of BBM ads from peak BlackBerry.

27:22BBM feels like it's faster. You can set up these groups and everyone can have input. My friends were with a boy that I had a crush on. They made him leave me a voice note. On BlackBerry Messenger, I made it my ringtone. Snap a picture of the lamp, send it on over to them, and then I sold a piece with BlackBerry Messenger. If you read my BBM and you don't answer me, I know you read it. I love that. I just want to point out, this is 2010. All of that existed everywhere else. BlackBerry was just, like, pretending that it still had something to hold on to. But it was the thing that kept people using BlackBerrys.

27:56But you could just run that ad about WhatsApp today. Oh, 100 % or iMessage. This is still how we communicate about everything, right? Yeah. Like, I had a crush on a boy, so I texted a friend. I sent a picture of a lamp to someone and they bought it. Yeah. Like, what are we – like, it's all the same. It's the playbook. It is wild how much of this BBM – And then right at the end, you get the – Got right. The, you know, the dark-haired girl with the big sunglasses being like, I'm from New York. Can I read something? Please. I want to set – first of all – By the way, I've lived in New York for like 15 years.

28:23It's fine. Well, it's true. I want to read this. This is an editorial I wrote for Engadget at the end of 2010. Okay. When I was getting ready to get rid of my BlackBerry. And I wrote, I'm more than aware that many don't understand the appeal of BBM, notably nearly all my fellow Engadget editors. So you got bullied out of using BlackBerry. But most of my closest friends and family had BlackBerrys, and the native messaging client absolutely destroys text messaging in terms of speed and capabilities. Yeah. It probably was still true in 2010. Two weeks later, I got an Android phone. Yeah. Right. Because the reason that none of your fellow Engadget editors would use a BlackBerry and use BBM with you is because we all had smart, like proper smartphones.

29:10You edited this. Almost certainly. Yes. Because I had an iPhone. I was like, Joanna needs to mourn before she joins the rest of us in the future. Well, but by that point, the only reason people stuck around was because there were the people who were like, no, I need the keyboard. That was me. Like that was still the time when people were absolutely convinced that the keyboard was better. And even if you sort of understood the point of a touch screen, you're like, no, I type a lot. I need the keyboard. And we had not broken that by this period. Yeah. And in fact, the reason I got the Droid 2 was because it had a slide-out keyboard.

29:41There you go. Yeah. The infamous slide-out keyboard that super lasted a long time, and all phones have them now, right? I was a very good typer on there. The thing that Mike Lazaridis would not have said at the time, but believed at the time, and is true, was that BBM was the only thing that still mattered at BlackBray. And they knew it. This is the thing, like even going back. Right, because it was sticky. Rim knew it. And we need to take a break. But then we're going to come back and I'm going to tell you how BlackBerry tried to get BBM to save the company. We'll be right back.

30:14Morning, Zoe. Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage? I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you. Teach me, Sildana. I couldn't possibly. At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch.

30:45All right, we're back. So now let's go to like 2013. So there's actually some reporting years ago that BBM had a working cross-platform and desktop version that would have worked everywhere as early as 2010. But the executives chose not to release it based on the – it's the same theory as iMessage, right? It's like if we make it easy to use the best thing about our platform on someone else's platform, people will leave our platform, right? And this is happening in 2010. And there's like one idea says BBM is our best asset. We need to put it everywhere and get everybody using it. And it becomes our thing.

31:21There's another that is like, no, we have to sell BlackBerrys. And the only way we'll sell BlackBerrys is if people keep using BBM. So these two sides keep fighting. This is like the oldest tech story ever. Like every company does this at some point. And the executives end up choosing to keep it all bundled together, which I think you could argue is ultimately what killed the whole thing. But a thing that I learned is that Jim Balsillie, played by our boy Glenn Howerton in the BlackBerry movie, his big idea for BBM at the time was to essentially turn it into AOL, right? Like BBM music is actually a sort of a nod at that idea.

31:55But it's like, what if we made this into a walled garden that was like the whole Internet, like truly embrace the super app idea? It's like we're going to go all in. It's going to be amazing. People are going to pay money. It's going to be the thing that keeps you on BlackBerry. They'll buy the devices just to use this thing. And it's like, we're going to make it Facebook, essentially. And the goal was to like get past carriers, eat competition, like really sort of build everything into BBM and charge money for people to use BBM. But at this point, Jim Bosley is not the CEO of BlackBerry anymore.

32:24Torsten Hines is the CEO of BlackBerry. He killed the whole thing because part of Jim's plan was to make this platform more important than devices, which sort of ultimately like made them go cross-platform. So they get rid of that. Jim quits. and then it all just continues to fall apart. So there's this idea, right? That like, okay, we can put these two things together and there are lots of people who want it and it'll stay sticky. And even if we don't keep growing and the market keeps growing, it'll still work. Right. And I just want to come back to - Everyone knew from the very beginning that messaging apps were sticky.

32:56Yeah. Right? All the way at the beginning. Like the government, just rewind your brain to be like, the Federal Trade Commission and the FCC he understand that AOL into Messenger is so sticky that if you let Time Warner buy it, there'll be an unstoppable behemoth. Again, this turned out not to be true. But I think what people also didn't really understand is when that stickiness goes, it goes all at once. Right? When people leave a messaging platform, they're all gone immediately. Right. And the way that it happens is when there is some sort of inflection point event, and that thing was the iPhone.

33:31And it was some combination of the iPhone and Android, which essentially happened at the same time, was like it just it unstuck the whole thing. Yep. And then in particular, 2011, iMessages introduced. Yeah. Right. So then this all goes to hell. But I think it's so interesting that people knew how sticky and powerful a messaging platform was so early, like so, so early. Everybody knew. And BlackBerry was like, well, we have this thing. We should just bet on this thing to keep selling the phones. And what no one had quite figured out is when they go, they just go. There's no fading monopoly. It's just tomorrow it's gone.

34:09I mean, this is kind of the thing I was wondering, right? The other thing that happens right around now is WhatsApp becomes a thing and just immediately takes over the world. And it did the cross-platform thing that people inside of Research in Motion have been trying to do for years. and part of me wonders like is there a world in which BBM got this right but then to your point there's all this other stuff happening simultaneously that it's like maybe even if they had played all of their cards correctly short of building better phones like if they had done all the software things right short of building better phones which is not nothing right like if they had made every good BBM decision which they didn't but if they had could it have worked?

34:48I think there's a strong chance the answer is just no because there were too many other things coming forward all at once. Well, think about how much revenue they would have had to have given up. That's right. I mean, just like straightforwardly, they make money selling BlackBerrys, the hardware, the service to the carrier, and then BBM is just like riding along on top of it. And then maybe you're buying $5 a month for BBM music. Whatever nonsense you're doing. Jim Balsley's plan was that you'd pay for it, like AOL, which worked pretty well for a pretty long time. We're going to take one part of our whole business and we're going to put it on Apple's platform, which wants to kill us.

35:22Right. And we're going to say somehow this costs money and there's no in-app purchasing back. Like none of this stuff exists yet. Right. And we're just going to give away free texting. And Apple's going to take a 30 % cut. Well, none of that exists yet either. Right? I mean, not too far after. These like titanic fights don't exist. And then even now you get to, I don't know, WhatsApp. And it's not like WhatsApp makes a bunch of money for Meta. Like it's an advertising service. They charge businesses to text people. Well, it's big around the world. But they had to invent all of this new business model.

35:55BlackBerry could not be like, what we're going to do is we're going to destroy our big rich business and then spend 20 years figuring out how to make BBM a business on Apple's platform. Like, I don't think that would have been a rational decision ever. No. And what you saw happen was others just followed this playbook. Pun intended. Which is Apple. They didn't follow the playbook. They followed a playbook. Well, a lot of people made shitty seven-inch tablets. Like, that playbook was deeply followed. That's true. That's true. That's fair. But Apple tries to do it with iMessage. Google does it in a more open way and makes 7 ,000 different messaging platforms over the next seven years, 10 years.

36:34Google's like, what if we don't run this company? And that's what hardware manufacturers started to try to do. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So we're near the end of the BBM story. But I just have two more moments I want to tell you guys about. One, do you remember in 2011 when the BBM network went down? I do. Of course you do. I covered it. Yeah? But I didn't have a BlackBerry then. Yeah, this was like breaking news. This was a big news. I remember covering it. Let me just play you some of the news coverage from this outage. BlackBerry users are losing access to email, text messaging, and web browsing.

37:06Everything you would own a BlackBerry for. Exasperated BlackBerry users gave vent to their frustration with the slowed down services over the last 36 hours. I'm feeling quite depressed and lonely because no one's getting back to me. My phone's not popping off like it used to pop off. So it's not a good look at the moment, BlackBerry. I have had no communication or emails for two days, and it's really annoying. The guy's like, my phone's not popping off. He's my hero. That's the whole verge. That's what we do here. We're like, the whole culture is like, is your phone popping off? His phone was not.

37:40Nations rise and fall on whether or not these phones pop off. His phone was not popping off. So this is what happens next. In 2013, BlackBerry, the company, is essentially like falling apart, right? Like it's a mess in so many ways. Its market share is shot. And I believe this is a really great Wall Street Journal piece from many years ago that they understood that BBM was like kind of the only remaining asset in the company. So they actually think about spinning it out. They're going to call it BBM Inc. And the plan is to turn it into like WhatsApp or Skype. Do you remember this? This is such a fun, like weird alternate history to go down where BBM Inc.

38:16is a thing that exists. They were also going to do BBM channels, which was basically like a Telegram clone. Again, like a lot of correct ideas just at weird times and with really bizarre execution. At this point, this is 2013, BBM, how many users do you think BBM still had in 2013? just guess within 10 million within 10 million 10 million there's your hint is it 10 million it's not 10 it's more than 10 million six million no she's just famously more than 10 it's not it was 60 60 million people still using bbm in 2013 unclear how share 50 songs at a time i guess maybe it was just the install base had the like everyone who had a phone had bbm was that bbm with the app strategy or BBM on phones?

39:01You have no idea. This was like the total BBM universe. Including the weird apps they made. But they actually only had like a couple of million users. Probably. Yeah. That was like, this is how many people had access to it. The iPhone wasn't out in all these markets yet. I mean, for a huge number of years, Apple's entire growth strategy was like, we discovered another country and now the iPhone hasn't. Are you aware of China? Apple's twice as big as it was before. Like every year they were doing this. But even just to give you another example, like in 2013, WhatsApp already had 300 million users.

39:34So it was like BBM was still around, but it was already like completely left for dead. And like you said, that was the year they shipped all the other apps. Finally, they like they launched everywhere else. A thing that I learned was that the Android APK leaked before the official announcement and was so popular and BlackBerry was so unready for it that they had to pause the rollout of BBM for a month. Wow. Because like a million people all tried to download this leaked version of the app, and it broke the whole system so spectacularly that they had to delay the launch for a month. They tried pre-installing it on LG phones when it came out, which, sure.

40:11Perfect. That's a thing you can do. That's a perfect, probably on Sprint. You know what, this is also the era of like. The pre-installed app on the LG phone on Sprint is how you know you're dying. Okay, real quick, though, let me just show you a chart that I found from a company called Distimo, which is, it's from November of 2013. and it shows the various messaging apps share in a bunch of different countries around the world. And it's kind of wild. And you have in places like India and Indonesia, it's still like a third of the market. These are huge markets. Like it is both very easy to lose the sort of momentum and stickiness, but it's also very hard to kill a messaging app.

40:47And in a lot of these places, especially before things like fast internet showed up a lot of places, Like it lingered. So like it didn't – it was hard to kill BBM. But we eventually did do it. It just goes. Right. Then it happened country by country in the same way that you're describing. And you can see that even with like little social networks. Like this is an experience we now have fairly often where something like Be Real shows up and it's like everyone's on Be Real. And then like the next day it's like Be Real has gone out of business. Right. Right. Because there's no business models for everyone's using your network unless you have like sustained usage.

41:24And I don't think BlackBerry, I don't think they could have ever made that turn with BBM. It was just fundamentally too hostile to the actual fund platforms themselves. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We need to take a break, but really quick before we do, what year do you think BBM finally went away? I mean, Joanna's still using it from what I gather. BBM was eventually sold to somebody else. Of course. What year do you think? It's the same private equity owner as Red Foster. They wrote a sad blog post about how it was going away. What year do you think it was? 2019. 17. 2019 is right. It's 2019. I prepared for the show.

41:57And they claimed there were still people using BBM in 2019. I just came here with, like, class warfare. I don't believe it. There's no other preparation. Me get the spot. All right, we got to take one more break, and then we're going to go back, and we're going to get to the version history questions. We'll be right back.

42:15Morning, Zoe. Jeff Bridges. Why are you still living above our garage? I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you. Teach me, Sildana. I couldn't possibly. At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch.

42:45All right, we're back. We have eight questions that we ask about every single thing we do on Version History. Question number one, what was the best thing about BBM? Oh, the absolute best thing about BBM is somebody who didn't use it and only made fun of my elite East Coast friends was the number of celebrities who were addicted to their black... Remember, we called them crackberries. And it wasn't because they were emailing or using the web browser. It's because they were on BBM all day long. And there's just video after video of like Drake and Marlon Wayans and Anna Kendrick, like Stacey Keebler being like, I love my BlackBerry.

43:21And it's like, oh, this is hilarious. It is maybe the first example of full-on smartphone addiction. Yeah. It was just like, because there were, the Crackberry thing was real. My phone stopped popping off like it used to. There were medical opinions about people who were addicted to their BlackBerrys. And it was. It was because of BBM. Yeah, and it was just because they were talking to their friends all day. And you can take that right out and be like, well, democracy is in danger. But we'll just rewind. The best thing about BBM was all of these celebrities constantly at every event, just like Bradley Cooper being like, I love it.

43:51I can't live without it. It is, we should run some of them. No, I'm addicted to it. It's awful. I actually prefer it to talking. I'm double fisted with Blackberries. Hey. Oh, I call it Crackberry. I'm so addicted. Oh my gosh. I email and I like pinning and I like Blackberry Messenger. Blackberry. I use this little thing for everything. So my life's in here. If I lose this, I don't know who I am, what I'm doing. It's very good. Joanna, what do you think? Best thing about BBM? I mean, everything. The spot, meeting at it. But I will say the one thing that I, and David, I know you have opinions on this, but you could do an away message.

44:28Yes. I know. I know you have thoughts. I do. But you could tell people your status in BBM. That was my answer, too. With a little emoji. Just like, and when that died, it never came back. Never came back. They all have it now. You can do status in like Instagram and stuff. No one cares. Nobody looks at that stuff. It's irrelevant. You can do it in WhatsApp, right? Mm-hmm. I think it's the same cross-meta nonsense. I think once it comes to iMessage, I will use it. I probably will, too. But it's like— It's got to come, though. But it was the right and good thing, and it should come back. I agree.

45:01It was the away message. Yeah. Bring back the away message. All flirting was conducted by iMessage. Oh, yeah. Right. Here's a fragment of a song lyric that is super about you. Right. And if the sadder it was, the more I wanted you to reach out to me about it. Right. And you would leave it—you would put that up. like you were going out for the night and you put that up and then you'd come back and be like what what was i thinking like that that's how like far away you would be from your computer oh yeah you couldn't just go back and turn it off it was it was that dashboard confessional exactly you committed to that lyric for the night or two days if you left your computer if you were crazy like me in college and just what was the point of an away message on a phone.

45:45This is why when I just, were you setting away messages on BBM? So you were like in a meeting. in a meeting. Yeah. You were in college. Well, but no, but again, it was, there was. Recording the Verge cast. BBM got so quickly to that thing of like. Yes. It hit the you are expected to respond quickly thing so fast. I just have this image of like Joanna in college. No, I didn't have it in college. Okay, when I, were you in your first job and you're like, I'm going to a meeting, I have to type a dashboard confessional into my hardware keyboard. That was AIM. I was doing that in college. Gotta go. No, no, that was in my dorm room.

46:17I was putting in the dashboard confessional. I'm with you on AIM. My boyfriend had cheated on me or whatever it was. And then I've got to go out. And then by the end of the night, I'm back with my boyfriend. And I'm like, oh my gosh. I've revealed. My AIM message is still that. Yeah. That's how long it would take to update this stuff. And then you would get it on your, we would have this on BBM and we could do it wherever we were. It could be so much responsive to your mood. For the youngs who are listening to this, I just want to offer an example of how effective any of this ever actually was.

46:47I ended up marrying the girl who lived in the dorm room next to mine. She wouldn't date me for eight years because the away message emo-ness was so strong. She's like, you're a mess. Like, you just figure out how and when to express yourself. You're like, no, I just love the cure. Leave me alone. And this is why you don't want it on your phone. I'm just trying to get to next door with this message and it didn't work. It's tough, man. I'm really sorry. All right, what was the worst thing about BBM? What do you got? I think that it stalled and they didn't bring it to other platforms. I think I agree.

47:22I mean, no? No, it's the obvious insane usability nightmare of the usernames being random digits of numbers. Oh, see, I'm actually pro pins. You didn't have to do that. Everyone did it. Yeah, because it was impossible to add another way. This is the worst thing. Yeah, they had like QR codes at the end. Let me reformulate my argument. Yes, that was also on my list is one of the worst things. That's so funny. I don't agree. I think like a number that is yours but isn't your phone number is like a good and valuable thing. And the fact that all of our usernames are just our phone numbers, which are also like the most important piece of personal security we have.

47:58Disaster. Give me more random numbers that I can give to people. Like I'm fine with it, honestly. It's just like, this is through your ideas. You're going to issue everybody a nine-digit number again? Okay. Go nuts, Jim. All right. Question number three. Would it have been a bigger hit if Apple made it? Well, it was. Yes. It's called iMessage. Apple did do it, and it was a much bigger hit. Wildly more successful product. Yeah. I mean, it is sort of funny, actually, because, like, you – Apple did just do all the things that people wanted to do. Oh, the iMessage lost. I have, like, literally, like, in the halls of the theater.

48:30People are like, oh, Blackberry said now. Yeah. Yeah. Like it was like that we today we have witnessed a murder. Like that was the vibe at that event. Yeah. Yeah. I think they're going to this. This is one of my favorite questions there, because there's some of times this can be very complicated and sometimes it's just, yes, Apple did do it much better. Well, Apple has all the same problems, right? iCloud is centralized in countries like China. You can just unplug it. You can just go get the data. The FBI, if you have iCloud backups of your iMessage, it's not encrypted. Like all of the same stuff has been recapitulated now with iMessage in the exact same way as BlackBerry.

49:01And all of your arguments you've made about stickiness could be one of the last things that holds people. But I will say, like, every time we talk about the stickiness of iMessage, we get a bunch of listeners from anywhere else in the world who are like, no one uses iMessage. It's just WhatsApp, WhatsApp 1. And I think that's largely true. And all of those countries have higher Android market share. Right. But there is clearly no question that it would have been a bigger hit if Apple made it because it did work super well. Question number four. If you could go back and do it yourself, what would you do differently?

49:32Joanna, I'm putting you in charge of BBM in 2008. Peak of its powers, BBM. What are you doing differently? Same thing we've been talking about, making it available to more phones, more cross-platform. But to Nilay's point, what about the rest of my hardware business? And so. Right. I mean, this is my original answer. But then I'm looking at it. I'm like, OK, actually, the story of consumer messaging is that it's not a business at all. There's no one has ever figured out how to rub two nickels together from letting people text each other. That's why if you're WhatsApp, you end up selling for a lot of money.

50:03It's what's killing Snapchat like over and over. This is there's just not a business here. And so that's this is my problem, too. I'm like that is from a product perspective, clearly the right answer. If you want a lot of people use BBM, that's what you do. You put it everywhere much faster. But there's sort of no evidence to suggest that there was a company to support that. I think any of my ideas are not actually about BBM. It's like ways to save BlackBerry. How would you have saved BlackBerry? Beds. Beds. But maybe, like, maybe I would have made a cloud business. You can't just say that. What is the cloud?

50:41Well, this is before the cloud. Oh, you mean you would have done like a desktop messaging in the cloud situation? Or maybe, I don't know, maybe it's better email. or like the company was an email company and like this is around the time Gmail blows up. I mean, there's a lot of cloud infrastructure that the company had ideas about and they could have made, I don't know. You just said my answer, which is I would have tried to do Gmail. It's like actually shove the two things together. But like the thing, part of the thing that Gmail did so successfully was they put Gchat into Gmail and that connection became really, really, really powerful.

51:17And if BlackBerry had built those two things together and then put it everywhere, then it's a thing you can charge people money to use for work. It becomes like you put email back into it and there starts to be more of a business case there that I would have been very into. You love emails. You have a T-shirt that says emails. Again, nations rise and fall. But what I would say, not to be a downer, there was no saving this company. at its DNA level, this is a company that is built around constraints. Slow processors, weak batteries, slow networks, constrained storage for email. And the reason Gmail existed where they're like, well, storage is free.

52:00Here's unlimited storage, right? Like here's a gigabyte of email storage. And everyone thought that was fake. Apple is like, it's a huge touchscreen that can run apps in full color. And everyone was like, that battery will never last. and BlackBerry at its core was optimized around limits and scarcity of like resource, like literally the resources, network, bandwidth, memory, whatever it is. And I don't think they could have fixed it because they needed to embrace the new era, which was about, oh, everything has gotten much faster and more powerful. Even like the first iPhone was not built for the network it was on.

52:34Remember, it was a 2G phone. They didn't have 3G for another year and they were still like, screw it, web pages. and like they were betting on a curve that BlackBerry was betting against. And I don't know that they could have flipped it. Like the thing I'm saying is like, I would have fixed it by making it a totally different company with a different attitude. And I don't know that that, I think that sometimes companies just miss the moment. And like BlackBerry is like the story of that really. So you would have sold. I would have, yeah, I would have gone to Apple and then like your future is the Fortune 500.

53:04It very clearly was. These BYOD policies, bringing in advice policies are the future. Like, here's our infrastructure. Yeah, we've built a bunch of really interesting technology. You can have it. I'm going to go buy a boat. Yeah, you're about to be in a dogfight with Microsoft, which they were to a huge extent. Like, here, just take that. All right. By the way, BlackBerry would have never done this. No, gosh. No. But maybe they should have. And then they could have. And talk about the constraints. Like, that's what they ended up, like, the last five years is them being in developing countries and developing worlds because they didn't have the network.

53:39You know IQ and X is in every car? Right. It's because every carmaker underspecks the processor and the memory and the compute of the car, and they don't want to pay for a lot of data. So they're like, what's the operating system we can run that's like for shitty phones? Because basically there's a shitty phone behind the screen of your car. Yeah, and if you put yourself in a position of always chasing the worst chip, that gets pretty ugly for you pretty fast. All right, next question. What feature of BBM should every current messaging app have? if you could just lift one and put it in, what would it be?

54:1250 songs for$5 a month. It's obviously away messages. I think that's right. There is like a version of the music sharing thing that I can almost see that would work, but you'd have to change it completely. I think we're all in agreement the answer is away messages. I think Apple does it. Is it SharePlay basically that? You don't pay for it? No, Apple tried to do it with Ping in it. Oh, yeah, Ping. It was a huge failure. That's right. No, I don't use the social Apple music. Yeah, no, it's a nightmare. I learned a while ago that you can use SharePlay to have the same music on two headphones. It's a disaster.

54:46No one should try it. Question number six. Is there an alternate timeline in which this thing was more or even more successful? And I think in this case, it's what if the iPhone doesn't exist? If the iPhone ships in 2012 and not 2007, is the story of BBM completely different? Right. There's an alternate world in which BBM is more successful if they didn't fumble the bag and they just put it on smartphones, like proper smartphones. Right. And then BBM becomes this like messaging layer. But everyone else made the same mistake. Like AOL Instant Messenger did not have a proper app on these phones.

55:20Google was like, man, everyone loves Gchat. It's not even called Gchat. Yeah. It's called Google Talk. What? At some point it was called Gchat. No, never was. Never? Gchat is like full on. We made it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That has been retconned into existence of messaging clients. And they just never put the proper app on a phone. Like, everyone looked at these phones and thought, well, we just won't put an app there. Until some people were like, we are billionaires because we put an app there. Yeah. WhatsApp. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Question number seven. Could you reboot it now? And I think the simple messaging app question, the answer is no.

55:56Right? Like, are we all in basic agreement on that? Yeah. Yeah, I think that's pretty tough now. I mean, maybe for like me. Just do it. Just give Joanna her pin back and it'll be okay. I did have a t-shirt and I tried to find it for this taping, but it said BBM me. And this was like a t-shirt they like were getting out at when those phones launched because they were still trying. Yeah. BBM and then E at the end. I love it. What about the like biggest, most ambitious, like super appy version of the thing? No one has yet built that thing. Because Apple won't let you in this country. True. Like, just straightforwardly, you're fighting against a set of platform policies that prevent the thing from existing.

56:44Yeah. And that's true everywhere at this point. There's no, you just can't win that game. Yeah, you're not going to roll into China and be like, WeChat now. Yeah. I mean, have you heard of WeChat? Have you tried this one? Do you disagree? Could you reboot it now? I mean, I think the everything app idea is harder in the U.S. because of the stickiness of all these other services that we're kind of used to using. So maybe there's a way where they like plug it. No, it's just like too complicated. Why would we all go through on something else? The only case I've been able to make for it is maybe the meta-ness of WhatsApp is becoming a problem for enough people that they would jump to something else.

57:22But I don't know. There's too many options right now. It feels like that's, it just feels like a losing battle. to try to start a messaging app from nothing. Even if I do think people have a lot of nostalgia for BVM. And I do think we've come a lot farther in our acceptance of using multiple messaging apps, right? Like we'll use Signal, we'll use WhatsApp, we'll use iMessage, we'll use Gchat, whatever it's called these days. But I feel like this idea of, at least in the US, it's always been very hard for people to grasp. I'm gonna need to do all these things in this app because I like Venmo or I like the Cash app or I like this music app.

57:55or at least I don't know. I mean, the argument against interoperability for all those apps, take it for what it's worth, is like, well, they're all on your phone. You just close one and open the other. Like, there they are. You don't have to worry about it. I think there's some downsides to that. Like, I don't think wanting one feature should make you leave the entire platform and your whole network of friends. Like, that's basically how they compete now. But I would say instead of trying to make it bigger, you want to make it smaller. Right. If you were to try to relaunch PBM, I don't know, you would be like, here's a messaging app that's just for families and kids.

58:28And we're going to make sure it's safe. Like, your kids want to text their friends. Like, this one will be locked down. And there are some that compete like that. But you don't have, like, the big BlackBerry brand name and all this stuff. And, like, that's – I think this solution here is smaller, bigger. All right. I like it. All right. And then last question. Does BBM belong in the Version History Hall of Fame? I will not be telling you the rules or qualifications because there are none so far. I left that blank because I, what are, what is. No, the answer is no. Does it belong? How many slots are there?

58:58Only so many people get in like the NFL Hall of Fame every year. I don't think they're like. And there's like a voting process. There is a voting process. Some people don't make it every year after year. That's where the tension comes from. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Do you have a silent. The same. Judging process. Do we know who's on that? I'm just saying. Just vibes. All Hall of Fames are just vibes. Okay. So that's what we're doing here. I think something BlackBerry belongs in there. Yeah, we'll get there. And that is the argument you make for like not including like a sports player. Like a pitcher.

59:24We should get a pitcher in here but not too strong. Right. Right. Understood. So I'm saying not knowing any of the qualifications except the one thing I know of Hall of Fames is only it can't be every episode is yes. Right. Agreed. We can't decide. The answer is a hard no. Listen, you have to vote on its merits. And I think on its merits it does make it in. I agree. All right. That is it. That's the show. We're done here. Thank you both for being here. This was delightful. And thank you, as always, for being here with us as well. You can watch this on YouTube. You can listen to it everywhere you get podcasts.

59:55The show is a production of The Verge and Vox Media. And as always, if you want to support us, the best way to do so is to subscribe to TheVerge.com. We'll see you next time.

1:00:18Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. Be sure to subscribe to the new Version History podcast feed to get all of our new episodes as soon as they arrive.

1:00:48you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch.