BlackBerry Messenger: Texting set free

It's 2005. Your phone bill is out of control because text messaging is taking off and you're paying 10 cents every single time you send or receive a text message. 10 cents, it's outrageous. But what if I told you there was a better way? What if there was an app on your phone that you could use to send messages to all your friends in real time for free and you could even see when they'd read your messages? And did I mention it's on your phone and that's never really happened too good to be true, but it's not. It's called BBM or Blackberry Messenger, but everybody calls it BBM. And it's built right into the phone that you either have or you wish that you had. From the VirginVox media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and weirdest and most important gadgets and products in the history of technology. I'm David Pierce and today we have to talk about texting. Stay tuned. Alright, we're back. It's Version History. It's time to talk BBM. My friends are here. Joanna Stern is here. Hi, Joanna. I'd like you to refer to me by my Blackberry pin number. Do you still know it? This is what I was going to ask you. This is my first question. 3509854. The good thing is you could just make that up. I did. Yeah. Neil Episodes also here. Hello. Hi, Neil. Do you remember your BBM pin? No. My role on this episode is to be the person who grew up in the Midwest away from these fancy East coasters and their Verizon network in Blackberry and provide the view of the common man. So, okay, this is another thing I wanted. Do you guys remember? The story here starts in 2005. Did you have a Blackberry in 2005? I did not. What phone did you have in 2005, do you think? I had almost certainly a Sony Ericsson. Okay. Yeah. I was a Sony Ericsson person. I like that. This was like the end, if memory serves of like the razor was still the thing but not for much longer. The LG chocolate was huge in 2005 if I'm doing my time correctly here. A little bit later. Was it a little later? A little later. Okay. Do you remember what you had? I had an LG flip phone. Yeah. A Verizon. This was that era when the goal was to make the phones as small as possible. Flip phones. Yeah. Yeah. And they were like, that was like the Zoolander phone. And then the other move was the Blackberry. And everyone I knew on the East Coast had a Blackberry. And everyone in the Midwest had like an LG chocolate that was free with the plan. But to your point, I was in college and the fancy kids did have Blackberries. I was not fancy. Not yet. Now, soon, soon, Joanne Stern would take her full bloom. It was fancy though at that point to have a color screen. Like a color LCD either on the outside of the phone or the inside of the phone. Yeah. I was like, I had one of the like T9 candy bar phones that again, I got for free with my Verizon plan. My family, we all got a family plan together in 2004. And it was like a momentous occasion in my family. And we all got the worst phone they had available because it was free with the plan. Yeah. You get a lot of analog razors for free right before the network. So in digital and got better. But Joanne, you are here because at some point between not having a Blackberry in 2005 and way after everyone stopped using PBM, you became like the world's foremost PBM user. Is that fair? Yes. In fact, I know Neil, I never had PBM because I could never message him there. I do remember you being like belligerent that everyone should be using PBM. Yes. And when we started the verge, it was even before then when we were at Engadget, a few people had PBM. I can still remember them. And again, I'm just going to point out the split was fancy East coasters and everyone else. It was. It really was. It absolutely was. We ran Engadget on AOL and some messenger, which is a different episode of the show. Oh, can I be invited back for that? Oh yeah. That may be the longest version history episode we ever did. Well, we really ran it on ICQ. Yep. But we must have just texted. If I was not at my huge laptop at the time, I must have just texted you. Yeah, that's right. And then when you came into the picture. For 10 cents a message. When you were a little baby. I know. And you came into the picture. I think I had a, I think I showed up with a trio 650. Yeah. Which I was very happy about. That close out trio 650. Yeah. All right. So let me just tell you the story of PBM as I know it. You both lived it more than I did you with a clear sense of jealousy and sadness. I was there for the every man. I was like, I don't understand these friends at all. Like, here we go. So, okay. So the story here starts in early 2005. And a thing I learned is actually 2005 was the year instant messaging as a whole became like a mainstream thing. There was a study that year that found that it was instant messaging was as big as email for the first time ever in 2005, which is actually later than I would have guessed. And also like, all the youngs were I am. I was like the big takeaways like all the young people are I am. And this is not like texting. This is I am. They were like sitting at the family computer on AOL instant messenger, which I did all through high school. That was my entire life. I was in again in college because you were a little baby. Correct. Yeah. You were still drinking a bottle and eating instant, like instant messenger defined college at that point because we couldn't communicate if we had left our computers. Like, you could do T nine texting on your little crappy phone. Yeah. The every man was even T nine texting in Minnesota or wherever you were from. So disrespectful. It was Wisconsin. I knew that. And every every commercial for texting was like teens and they would all be sending some variation on the same message, which was meet me at the spot. And it was just like it became it was a running joke of my friends that we would only text each other meet me at the spot because that was every single commercial was like happy teens and Jeep Wrangler being like maybe at the spot. And like this is all you ever text. I feel like it was usually surfing at the spot. Right. They like mostly surfed at whenever wherever the spot because you because you it was too expensive to have a whole conversation on like messaging phones. Right. You just did these like logistical conversations on text. And part of those like ads were they were a bucket of text messages that your family could get back to your family plan or you had to kind of pay per text. Right. Right. So that that's the two things I feel like are really important to remember about this period is like WeChat didn't exist. WhatsApp didn't exist. Facebook hadn't done anything. Google Talk launched in 2005, which I thought was interesting, but it wasn't built into Gmail yet and nobody was really using it. But it was like all this stuff was like starting to happen. Yeah. But it was still you you sent me at the spot text messages and so you did all of your actual conversation stuff at the spot. You were like everything was about when and how are we going to get to the spot or you would run back to the spot that was your desktop computer. So then once again, say I'm going to the spot. Right. What's really fascinating about this at that time is even back then, everyone new messaging platforms were so sticky that they could create like powerful locked in competitors. So during one of Time Warner's many attempts to buy something they bought AOL, you might recall, a doomed merger that was eventually undone the Time Warner story. And during that merger, the government said, we're going to let you buy AOL. But AOL instant messenger is so powerful and so sticky that a condition of the merger is you have to make it interoperable with other instant messaging platforms. Because even back then, everyone knew this is lock in. You can't get all your friends to leave one platform and join another. And in fact, I'm remembering some of those messaging phones did at some point, I don't want to say it was 2005, but maybe a little bit later, like two years later, had AIM, had instant messenger and maybe Google talk, but it was the crappiest experience. Because it was like some, I don't know, what were they, WAP apps? Yeah, they were all really bad. They ran in like fake internet. You had to pay extra for fake internet. And you had gotten an error and be like, you got to pay AT&T $700 to get to this app. And so there was like, again, I just keep highlighting this, there was the laptop computer world of messaging and there was the mobile world of messaging. Totally. And the thing about the 10 cents thing is it was like, it was a absolute like money fountain for carriers. If I remember right, it was like, the story is it was basically like a rounding error of bandwidth that they figured out how to put messaging and that's why it's 160 characters. And they just like 10 cents message. Was it 140? I think so. No, that was Twitter and they made it 140 so that you could also put in the username and get to 160 character Come on. I said that as an avatar for the audience, which was also wondering. They were making a ton of money off of this. Let me just play this for you. I hope they said meet me at the spot. Bethan! WAU. Your cell phone bill is what's up. All this texting. OMG, IMVD. It is a big deal. Who are you texting 50 times a day? I decay my BFF Jill. Tell your BFF Jill that I'm taking away your phone. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah. Right. They were like family messaging and it's going to cost you a fortune. But so the fascinating, like the right before BBM thing that happened that I thought was super interesting and had completely forgotten about is that BlackBerry launched a new app that was going to integrate all this stuff, all the stuff that you're talking about. BlackBerry was like, we're going to put, I think it was Yahoo Messenger, AIM and ICQ. They were like, we're going to do IMing on your phone and it's going to be cool and it's going to work. And it was like a little wonky because doing that stuff on mobile is a little bit harder because you have like the buddy system or the buddy list stuff is fine. But then there's like the status stuff that's a little weird around phones, but they were going to do it. Like they understood that internet messaging to your point is going to be the thing. I think they also had a sense that people on BlackBerry's were essentially emailing in real time. Yeah. Because the way the BlackBerry network was architected, and this is like the plot of the movie, which we both love, like that was BlackBerry was they re-architected how the cell networks worked. And they had big BlackBerry enterprise servers all over the place. Bez. Yeah. They were actually doing the work. Bez. Bez. Bez. Bez. Bez. Bez. Bez. Yes, Bez. BlackBerry enterprise server. And that's like your business would have one, but then BlackBerry ran one for the big networks. Yep. And the actual handsets were doing almost nothing on the network. It was the servers that were handling all of the traffic and all the processing because the phones were bandwidth constrained, battery constrained, all that stuff. And that was as much the thing BlackBerry did or that was their edge. Research in motion did then correctly that no one else was doing, was they like made that stuff work. Yeah. They centralized the hard part because the network was crappy. Right. And so they're like, okay, people are emailing in real time. We can just extend that model to A1S Messenger or Yahoo Messenger, and we'll bite off another little bit of the internet and make that on the phone. Yeah. And that was a very linear progression from what they were doing with email. Obviously, this was not the right idea, but it was, you can see how they got to it very quickly. Yeah. Well, and so it did sort of happen that quickly as it seems. There wasn't some grand proclamation about we need to embrace internet messaging. It was just like somebody just made the thing send text messages. And I have a whole story about this, but there's also a clip from the BlackBerry movie that you're talking about that literally just explains the whole thing. If I remember correctly, it's halfway into the movie. And Jim Ball Sully, who's played by Glenn Howerton, my boy Dennis Reynolds from It's Always Sending in Philadelphia, shows up and his team pitches him on a messaging app they've just created. Let's just play the clip. Do you know how much it costs to send a text message? Yeah. Ten cents. And the network gets every penny. We're never going to see that money. Right. But these texts are sent via data. So behind the network's back, which means unlimited free texting only on BlackBerry. Fuck yes. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, it went down like that. That's basically right. From what I understand it, yeah. From what I always saw when he was there. And it was great. But like, I think you're right that it essentially was that simple. They were like, oh, well, we can do this thing with email. We can just do it with text messaging. Yeah. And I, to be honest, don't really remember the moment it came out. But from what I've read, it was like the idea of you can send text messages to people and not pay 10 cents per text message was immediately a big deal. Do you guys remember this moment at all? I was a little late to it. But I do remember that being one of the reasons I wanted a BlackBerry. Because your friends were on it. Because my friends were on it and I knew I could BBM with them. Yeah. And I had friends that had it and had talked about BBM to me. So it was, as he said, this was the selling point. Yeah, it took off. So the app itself was created by a bunch of people, but particularly this guy named Gary Klassen. Shout out to Gary. He works at Google now, which feels great. The app I learned very recently was originally called Quick Messenger. It was like this close to being called Quick Messenger, all one word. And then somebody called it BBM. Before they really called it BlackBerry Messenger, they were calling it BBM, which I found sort of fascinating. It's like, BBM is like almost a backeronym out of just, we just want to call it the thing BBM. And it had this thing called pin-to-pin messaging, which is where the pin stuff was really important because one of the things that let you do was read receipts, which nothing had ever had before. But you could see if somebody had looked at your message just because of the way that it was able to connect over the BlackBerry network. And I have this quote from Gary Klassen that I thought was really interesting. He said this in 2015 on the 10-year anniversary. He said, BBM was the first form of text communication that was instant cross-carrier and mobile in a time when people were still attached to their PCs. Can we go back to the name for a second? Because when I was preparing for this, I was, why wasn't it called BM for obvious reasons? I was going to say, you got there very quickly. Yeah, I got there very quickly. But like, I'm not sure, and I wonder about listeners who are listening to this in this day and age, if they even know that this related to BlackBerry. Like, BBM became this thing that you needed to have a BlackBerry for, but the name wasn't in it. Like, BlackBerry Messenger was not what people ended up saying. Because it was just BlackBerry. It was part of the platform. It's like MTV or the SATs. It's like, it always doesn't stand for anything anymore. And it didn't mean anything. Yeah, like the branding wasn't there for them. Right. Yeah, because even we're going to get to this, but like many years later, BBM showed up on lots of other stuff and nobody ever called it. It wasn't like BlackBerry Messenger for iPhone. It was just BBM. Right. It was like, what does BBM stand for? Like, I don't know. What does ESPN stand for? Like, no one. They should have called it BM and it would have gone down better. They would have at least gotten more coverage. Just BM me later. I think that's, I'm going to get HR calls by that. Back to your series conversation. So anyway, so the app ends up launching August 1st, 2005. This all happens very fast. Was what I learned today. Like basically decided to do this thing and shipped it in just a few months. And let me just read you a list of some of the things that it had like in version one. It had group chat. It had online offline status. You could send files. It had read receipts. It had the mutual authentication, the like buddy list stuff that it borrowed from IM. And basically every other just sort of straightforward messaging. Like it was a full on IM client for mobile like from day one. But I'm just saying they just were like, oh, people are emailing in real time. Now it's called BBM. And so they just inherited a bunch of like file transfers from their existing email service. And then they added the buddy list and the pin and on the reader seats. Right. It's like, if you just smash BlackBerry Enterprise server into IM, you get BBM in like a very straightforward way, which is kind of wild. And going back to this idea of like what we used to do at our computers, like I think this was fundamental to BlackBerry and also fundamental to their fall, is they really just were like, what are people doing at their computers and do they want to do on the go? Because they were kind of like get shit done company, right? We're going to let you do your work on the go and sure that ended up translating really well to consumers. And they saw, as you said at the beginning of this, that more people at this time were starting to do instant messenger on their computers. And so they were like, great, put another thing into the phone, which obviously was the problem for them. They kept trying to shove things into a phone without thinking about like taking like sort of the desktop model and the computer model and just shoving it into mobile, which you know what happened. It's like, I got my first BlackBerry in 2007. It's like, do you know what else happened in 2007? I want to say it was the end of 2006 because I'm thinking like I graduated college in 2006 and got my first like phone. Like I was like, I'm ready for the world. I definitely got my first BlackBerry after the iPhone launched. Now that I'm doing that. I want to point out that David is also a fancy pants East coaster. He was like, I grew up and I was in Connecticut and then I was issued a BlackBerry by the state. By my family. You're closer than you think. David's family had a bed server. I got it from the dad of a kid that I babysat because he got a free one from work. That's a real thing that happened. It's like, if you entered Greenwich, Connecticut in 2006, you were handed a BlackBerry. Oh, 100%. It really was. You could tell who worked in finance because and I have these distinct memories of getting on the train from Greenwich to New York and it felt like all of a sudden one day everybody had a BlackBerry. Yeah. And it was like, because that was the whole pitch, right? It's like, you can do your emails while you're on the train on the way to work. And that was like life changing for people. And now instant message. And me, I'm just sitting there putting stuff in my calendar as like a singer in high school. Oh, there was nothing funnier when all the high schoolers got like bomb pilots and were like, what's on your calendar? It's like nothing to do this social studies. Like, who is this for? But yeah. So okay. And you said this while we were watching the clip. But one of the big things was this pin to pin technology was supposed to be super secure. It turns out not so much. Well, it was just the target of the BlackBerry server was irresistible to governments around the world. So one of the stories we were just endlessly covering it in gadget would be India has decided BlackBerry needs to break encryption. And then they could just turn off the BlackBerry network, because they could just find the bez and unplug it until BlackBerry caved. And there was just this huge back and forth fight in a way that you don't end to end encryption on phones. It's much harder to just go to Jim Balsaly and be like, fix it or I'm taking your business away. Right. And at that time, there was just so much pressure on this company. And eventually, I think they caved in a couple of countries around the world. That I think really, that's one that you knew they no longer had the power they once had. Right. When the pressure on them was so great, and they couldn't just resist it because they were BlackBerry in a way that, for example, Apple and Google can just resist it because they are Apple and Google. But yeah, eventually, some of this stuff started breaking down. I also feel like it's just a thing you can unplug. It turned out to be a bad security practice. In general, all the information is on that computer. Just give me that computer is a real thing cops can say. Right. Yeah, that's very true. All right. So, BBM comes out, big hit, immediately takes off. It was really funny going back and reading a bunch of stuff from those first years. Nobody could really explain why they liked BBM so much, except that it was cheaper and it was really fast. That was the thing I'd forgotten about BBM, this thing where you could literally instantly real-time message each other. I also forgotten how unreliable SMS was back in the day, that messages would just get lost. Things would happen. You never really... And BBM was like, it was a reliable, fast way to get in touch with people. And that was a bigger deal to folks, even in that era that I had remembered. And you didn't have... You talked about the 160 character. You didn't have that. So, it wasn't like splitting messages. When we would text at that, you would get an error. You can't send it anymore and you'd have to send that and then continue your message. So, it was just, again, all of those things that you had gotten used to messaging at your computer. And I can't remember. Like, when did AIM have read receipts? Anyway, that was another huge thing about BBM. You knew somebody had gotten that message. It had gone through, it was reliably delivered, and they were not responding to you. Okay, wait, here's a fun question. Do you remember the letters? There were two letters that it used to show you different status in the read receipts. Do you remember what they were? DNR? You're right. It was D for delivered and R for read. But at first, a fun fact that I learned was that at the very beginning, instead of the R, it was actually an A, because a designer had read the thing wrong and coded in an A instead of R. So, for red, it just showed up an A. That's perfect. Yeah, that's great. Blackberry. Accessed. But anyway, so we're fast forward through time here. BBM blows up. BBM 5 comes out. Big deal. Very exciting. This is like peak Blackberry. It ended up getting like every feature you could possibly imagine, which I'd forgotten. You could send money. You could post to... Yeah, there was a money sending thing eventually. This is like the world's first super app. This came later. But then you could eventually post to Facebook and Twitter. It had a... There was BBM Music. Do you guys remember BBM Music? I 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 three pounds, Blackberry users will have unlimited access to 50 personally selected songs. And then once every four weeks, you'll be able to change 25 contracts on your list. Now, this doesn't sound like a great deal on its own. What we'll pull in users is the ability to access all 50 songs on each of your BBM... Why are you trying to make it sound good? But beware to choose your music carefully. The 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. Oh, no, it's not a pan. She's pushing the phone into the shot. So thank you TechRadar. 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's a TechRadar hand zone. Yeah. It's completely true that she 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. Yeah. And you... 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 Justin Bieber, that it's like hide your Justin Bieber songs so your friends can't listen to them. Like I would like to listen to Justin Bieber on my friends' 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. Super 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 5 billion songs on my iPod for free. I remember trying to make my Blackberry like an iPhone and I would side load music onto my Blackberry. And it was a terrible experience. Yeah. So this was Blackberry being like you no longer have to put music on a MicroSD card or whatever card it was or use a micro USB cord to side load from your BBM desktop app. I 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. Well, and the reason we're doing this- 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 5 extra dollars. You already had an iPad or an iPod. 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 bros all over the world. All over the world. People are BBMing. And they don't want to go to the iPhone yet because it's not on Verizon or any other carrier really. I mean, they started launching internationally when. Right at the beginning. It was first in AT&T and then they started adding markets. So we are stuck. We are stuck with Blackberry. And so here comes BBM music for 99 a month. And by the way, it's a BBM thing, which I think is really interesting. Right. And so this is- 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. Because at this point, you're right. It was the stickiness. Exactly right about the- 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 didn't do that. I was that person. I had the Blackberry, like I said, I'm side loading music to the Blackberry, but it's not working very well. Did you have little gadget pockets? You would 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 inside a bag. Sure. Yeah. Remember the HTC rhyme? They made that for me. They made phones for women back then. This was me. And so maybe I paid for BBM music. I'm not ashamed to say I might have. You probably did. But before, so 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, like there was 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. BBM 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 white snow on Blackberry Messenger. I made it my ringtone. So now I have a picture of the lamp, sending 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. This is like Blackberry was just pretending that it still had something to hold on to. But it was the thing that kept people using Blackberry. But you could just run that ad about WhatsApp today. Oh, where I message. This is still how we communicate about everything. 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 doing? It's all the same. The playbook. It is wild how much of this BBM. And then right at the end, you get 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. It's fine. Well, it's true. I want to read this. This is an editorial I wrote for Engadget at the end of 2010 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. Most of my closest friends and family have Blackberries and the native messaging client absolutely destroys text messaging in terms of speed and capabilities. Yeah. It was probably what it 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. You edited this. Almost certainly. Because I had an iPhone and 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 protection, 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 Druide 2 was because it had a slide out keyboard. There you go. Yeah. So the infamous slide out keyboard that super lasted a long time and all phones have them now, right? I was very good type around 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 Blackberry 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. All 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. There'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 Balsely 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. But it's like, what if we made this into a walled garden that was like the whole internet, like truly embraced 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 Blackberrys. They'll buy the devices just to use this thing. It's like, we're going to make it Facebook, essentially. And the goal was to 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 Balsely is not the CEO of Blackberry anymore. Torsten 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 made them go across 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 new from the very beginning that messaging apps were sticky. Yeah. Right. All the way to the beginning. Like the government is just rewind your brain to be like the federal trade commission and the FCC understand that AOL and some 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. Right. When people leave a messaging platform, they're all gone immediately. And the way that it happens is when there is some sort of inflection point event and that thing was the iPhone. And 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 isn't truest. 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. Right. There's no, there's no fading monopoly. It's just tomorrow it's gone. I mean, this is kind of the thing I was wondering, right? Is like the other thing that happens right around now is WhatsApp becomes a thing and just immediately takes over the world. And like it did the cross platform thing that like people inside of research and 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? If they had made every good BBM decision, which they didn't, but if they had, could it have worked? I 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 blackberries, the hardware, the service to the carrier, and then BBM is just like riding along the top of it. And then maybe you're buying $5 a month for BBM music, whatever nonsense you're doing. Jim Bosley's plan was that you'd pay for it like AOL, which worked pretty well for a pretty long time. So 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. 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. 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 WhatsApp and it's not like WhatsApp makes a bunch of money for Meta. Like it's an advertising surface. They charge businesses to text people. It's big around the world, but they had to invent all of this new business model. Blackberry 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 and 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 follow this playbook. Pun intended. Which is Apple. They didn't follow the playbook, but they followed a playbook. Well, though, 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. Google'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 I 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. I didn't have a Blackberry then. Yeah. This is 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. Everything you would own a Blackberry phone. Exasperated Blackberry users give 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 guys took my phone. My phone is... 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. Nations 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 falling apart. Right? It's a mess in so many ways. It's 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 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 WhatsApp or Skype. Do you remember this? Yes. This is such a fun, weird, alternate history to go down where BBM Inc. is a thing that exists. They were also going to do BBM Channels, which was basically a telegram clone. Again, a lot of correct ideas just at weird times and with really bizarre execution. At this point, this is 2013, how many users do you think BBM still had in 2013? Just guess, within 10 million. Within 10 million. Within 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 million. It's not. It was 60. 60 million people still using BBM in 2013. Unclear. Share 50 songs at a time, I guess. Maybe it was just the install base had everyone who had a phone had BBM. Was that BBM with the app strategy or BBM on phones? You have no idea. This was the total BBM. Including the weird apps in the universe, I think so. Yeah. But they actually only had a couple of million users. Probably, yeah. That was like- I do not make sense. This is how many people had access to it. Well, the iPhone wasn't out in all these markets yet. For a huge number of years, Apple's entire gross strategy was like, we discovered another country and now the iPhone has it. Right. Like, are you- We looked at a map. 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, in 2013, WhatsApp already had 300 million users. So it was like, BBM was still around, but it was already completely left for dead. And like you said, that was the year they shipped all the other apps. Finally, they launched everywhere else. I think 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. 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. Perfect. That's the thing you can do. That's a perfect- That's probably on Sprint. You know what, this is also the era of- To pre-install the 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. And 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 then when it goes, it just goes. Right. And I- 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. And I don't think Blackberry, I don't think they could have ever made that term with BBM. It was just fundamentally too hostile to the actual fun 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'm in Janice will use it. I'm gonna gather. BBM was eventually sold to somebody else. Of course. What year do you think- It's the same private act that you own as Red Lobster. They wrote a sad blog post about how it was going away. What year do you think it was? 2019. 17. 2019 is right. 2019. I prepared for the show. And they claimed that 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're gonna take one more break and then we're gonna go back and we're gonna get to the version history questions. We'll be right back. All 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 mid East Coast friends was the number of celebrities who were addicted to their Black- Remember, you call them crackberries. And it wasn't because they're emailing or using the web browser. It's because they were on BBM all day long. And there's just a video after video of like Drake and Marlon Waynes and Anna Kendrick, like 2000, Stacy Kebler being like, I love my Blackberry. And it's like, oh, this is hilarious. Like it is maybe the first example of like full on smartphone addiction. Yeah. It was just like, because there were they like the crackberry thing was real. And my phone stopped popping off like it used to. There were like medical opinions about people who were addicted to their Blackberries. And it was, it was because of BBM. Yeah. And it was just because they were talking to their friends all day. Yeah. And like, you can see, you can take that right out and be like, well, democracy is in danger. But like, well, 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. I can't live without it. It's, 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 fisting 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. The one thing that I, and David, I know you have opinions on this, but you could do an away message. Yes. I know, I know you have thoughts. 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 as if 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. I think once it comes to that, I message I will use it. I probably will too. But it's like. It's got to come now. And why not be done? But it was, it was the right and good thing. It's very complicated for Apple. And it should come back. I agree. It was, it was the away message. Bring back the away message. All flirting was conducted by an away message. Oh yeah. Right. And especially. Here's a fragment of a song lyric that is super about you. Totally. 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 song. 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? This is why they don't exist. Or what, were you setting away messages on BBM? So you were like. Stop looking at your phone. Yeah. In college. Well, but no, but again, it was. Recording the verge cast. BBM got so quickly to that thing of like. Yes. It hit the you are expected to respond quickly. I just have this. So fast. I just have this image of like Joanna in college. No, I didn't have it in college. Okay. When I, when you're in your first job and you're like, I'm going to a meeting. I have to type a dashboard confessional. This was a. Hardware keyboard. That was aimed. That I was doing that in college. Breathe in for a while. Gotta go home. No, no, that was in my dorm room. I was putting in the dashboard confessional. Okay. I'm with you on aim. I just understand I'm back there. My boyfriend 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. 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 for the, for the, for the, for the young's who are listening to this. I just want to, I just want to offer an example of how effective any of this ever actually was. I 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 you express yourself. Like, no, I just love the cure or leave me alone. Like, literally. And this is why you don't want it on your phone. I can't, I'm just trying to get, I'm 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, that it stalled and they didn't, they didn't bring it to other platforms. I think I agree. It's, it's, I mean, Wait, no. No, it's the, obvious, insane usability nightmare of the username is 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 so worse. 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. I don't agree. I think like a, 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 disaster. Sure. 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 IMS. Apple did do it and it wasn't much bigger hit. Wildly, a bit more successful product. Yeah. I mean, it is sort of funny actually, because like you, Apple did just do all the things that Oh, I messaged lost. I have like literally like in the halls of the theater, people are like all Blackberry said now. 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 is one of my favorite questions there because there's some of times it's going to 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 like all of the same stuff has been recapitulated now with iMessage in the exact same way as Blackberry. And all of your arguments you've made about stickiness could be one of the last things that holds people. But I will say like we, every time we talk about the stickiness of iMessage, we get a bunch of you or a bunch of listeners from anywhere else in the world. In the country. I know. Who are like, no one uses iMessage. It's just WhatsApp, WhatsApp one. 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. Uh, question number four, if you could go back and do it yourself, what would you do differently? Joanna, 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 Nilae's point, what about the rest of my hardware business? And so, right. I mean, this is, that was my original answer. But then I'm looking at it and I'm like, okay, 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. It'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 to 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. Right. I think any of my ideas are not actually about BBM. It's like ways to save Blackberry. How would you save Blackberry? Beds. Beds. I mean, that's- But maybe, like maybe I would have made a cloud business. You can't just say that. No one, what's the, what is the cloud? Well, 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 it could have made. I don't know. You just said my answer, which is I would have tried to do Gmail. Is like actually- Yeah, they love email. Actually shoved 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. And 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. Yeah. Again, nation's rise and fall. But what I would say, Nostbe 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, her email. And the reason Gmail existed where they're like, well, storage is free. Here'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 resources, 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. Remember 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 missed the moment. And like Blackberry is like the story of that really. So you would have sold. I would have gone to Apple and been like, your future is the Fortune 500. It very clearly was. These BYOD policies bringing advice policies are the future. 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. Yeah. To a huge extent. Like just take that. All right. By the way, Blackberry would have never done this. No, no. Now. 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. That's where that's so existed. QAX is in every car. It's because every car maker underspects 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. Right. 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. The way it is. 50 songs for $5. It's obviously way messages. I think that's right. There is some, there is like a version of the like music sharing thing that I can like almost see that would work, but you'd have to change it completely. I think we're all on agreement. The answer is away messages. I think Apple does it. Is it share play basically that? You don't pay for it? You have a huge share playing in it. Oh yeah, paying. It was a huge thing. That's right. No, I don't use the social apps. Nightmare. I learned a while ago that you can use share play to have the same music or two head fights. It's a disaster. No 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? 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 and some messenger did not have a proper app on these phones. Google was like, man, everyone loves GChat. It's not even called GChat. Because it's called Google talk. At some point it was called GChat. No, never was. GChat is like full on. We made it. Yeah. Okay. That has been retconned into the absence 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. What's that? Yeah. All right. Question number seven, could you reboot it now? And I think the simple messaging app question, the answer is no. Right. Like are we all in basic agreement on that? Yeah, I think that's pretty tough now. I mean, maybe for like me, just do it. Just give Juliana 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 giving 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 happy 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. Yeah. 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, we do it now. Right. Yeah. Try it. I mean, have you heard of WeChat? Have you tried this one? Do you, do you disagree? Could you reboot it now? I mean, I think the everything app idea is harder in the US 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, like plug it. No, it's just like too complicated. Why would we all go through on some of those? The only case I've been able to make for it is maybe the, the meta-ness of WhatsApp is becoming a problem for enough people that they would jump to something else. But I don't, 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 BBM. 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 going to 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 or 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, you know, they're, they're, 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 BBM, you, I don't know, you would be like, here's a messaging app that's just for families and kids and we're going to make sure it's safe. Like you, your kids want to text their friends. Like we're going to, this one will be locked down. And there are some that compete like that, but you've got, you don't have like the big Blackberry brand name and all the stuff. And like that's, I think this solution here is smaller. I figure. 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? Only so many people get in like the NFL Hall of Fame every year. I don't think there are 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. All Hall of Fames are just vibes. Okay. So that's what we're doing here. I think something Blackberry belongs in there. I don't know if. And that is the argument you make for like not including like a sports player. Right. Right. Like a picture. We should get a picture 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 Fame is only, it can't be every episode is yes. Agreed. We can't decide that. The answer is a hard no. Listen, you have to vote on its merits. And I think on its merits, it doesn't make it a. 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. The show is a production of The Verge and Fox 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. Version history is produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Eric Gomez, Andrew Marino and Alex Parkin. Studio support from Chris Schertleff. Our 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.