Says the soul user of hangouts. I don't use it and haven't used it in ages. If BBM had stayed what it was when it first came out I think it would be the leading chat app, but a piss poor monetization strategy which included hords of adds, tons of spam and useless add ons, while at the same time the removal of everything that the original users loved, ultimately led to this. If the day BBM became active on Android and IPhone they had just set up a $5/ year sub and left it as it had always been, I think it would have done well.
I still can't believe that company mismanaged itself to the point of not even being a name in the smartphone industry anymore.
It is still a name. They still make phones and some people still swear by them. Windows phones are the ones that aren't a name anymore.
Isn't that the OS rather than the hardware and the enterprise software? They've changed their focus. No question that they are not even a smidgen of the Goliath they once were, but I'm not sure if that graph is really reflective of an area that they are even focusing on.
Exactly my point though. They've given up on smartphones. The very thing that built the company in the first place. It's a mismanagement story of epic proportions.
They were more software than phones. Its more like they've gone back to their roots now. Doing what worked for them. Enterprise stuff.
No actually they weren't. In 2008 they made 80% of their profits from smartphones, 14% from services and 2% from software (source). They pivoted to software after they watched their smartphone division implode.
You guys are good at making excuses for them lol Go read their yearly financials and you'll see how it went down.
I remember the start of BB. My monochrome one that could only send mail every so often. (I think it was either 5 or 15 minutes) When BES came out it was a total game changer. It was so fast my users would get their email on the BB a few seconds before Exchange would send it to Outlook. The ability to remote wipe or lock devices happened years before Exchange server managed to do it. I always said it would have been the perfect device for a criminal organization. Totally secure, and if your guys are going to get busted you nuke them before they have a chance to get them in a faraday cage.