Blackberry could be looking at a spinoff company based on their popular messaging service, BBM. According to the Wall Street Journal on Aug. 27, Blackberry is orchestrating a strategic review of the company that could result in the sale of Blackberry at the same time it is looking to bring the messenger to life.
The benefit of creating BBM, Inc., as it would be called, is to actually assist in the sale of the company as a whole by restructuring assets. Citing people ‘familiar with the matter,” WSJ noted that the new company would add video chatting to the messaging service, which would be available on all phones.
As GigaOm states, BlackBerry phone sales are not enough to keep the company afloat, as the phones are regularly outsold by Apple, Android and Microsoft phones. However, the messaging service has remained “widely popular around the world.” By incorporating tools that were previously expected to be released, such as BBM Channels, Blackberry seems to think this company could become a rival not just for messaging apps, but also for Twitter.
By changing focus, do you think BlackBerry will be able to attract a buyer to their company? It doesn’t seems likely that the service, which would be a newcomer to smartphones, could pull ahead of popular messaging services that have already been around for so long. The potential buyers for BlackBerry seem to be a rather small pool, as Apple, Android and Microsoft already have their own messaging services and there are several independent messaging services that are far more popular than BBM.
It’s not an unexpected move for BlackBerry, but it’s just not looking like it’s overall the right one in the long run.
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