BlackBerry BBm

BlackBerry was once in a similar situation. Evolving from the pager they grew to support email first, then BBM. By 2006 they were an incredibly popular handset manufacturer with an incredibly popular messaging service attached to their platform. And those two things, their handset popularity and their messaging popularity, were inextricably linked.

By 2010, however BlackBerry's handsets had fallen behind iPhone and Android. There was talk of BlackBerry taking BBM cross-platform but nothing ever came of it. They were seemingly afraid that if they let their messaging system go, their users would go with it. It wasn't apparent to them at all that their messaging business could surpass their handset business. That BlackBerry as a company could be valued at around $5 billion and WhatsApp, a cross-platform clone of BBM, would one day go for $16 billion. So BlackBerry waited. They waited until many of their users had moved on and only then did they take BBM cross-platform. And instead of a position of strength and dominance, they find themselves fighting to survive.