Version History: BlackBerry Messenger

Hey there, I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am about to play you another episode of our new show, Version History, all about old technology and the most important moments and products in the history of tech. If you like the show, please make sure to subscribe to Version History wherever you get podcasts, or you can find it in the Verge channel on YouTube. Hit us up with all of your feedback. I hope you enjoy. 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 before. It all sounds 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 Virgin Fox Media, this is Virgin 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.

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All right, 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. 3509-854. The good thing is you could just make that up. I did. Yeah. Neal Epstel is also here. Hi, Neal. 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 and BlackBerrys, and provide the view of the common man. So, okay, this is another thing I wonder. 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 Razr 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. Right. 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 a plan. But to your point, I was in college and the fancy kids did have BlackBerrys. I was not fancy. Not yet. Soon Joanna Stern would take her full bloom. It was fancy though at that point to have a colored screen. Oh, interesting. Like a color LCD either on the outside of the phone or the inside of the phone. Yeah, I was like, I had a...

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 networks went digital and got better. But Joanna, you are here because at some point between not having BlackBerry in 2005 and way after everyone stopped using BBM, you became like the world's foremost BBM user.

Yes. In fact, I know, Neil, I never had BBM because I could never message him there. I do remember you being like belligerent that everyone should be using BBM. Yes. And when we started The Verge, it was even before then when we were at Engadget, a few people had BBM. 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 Instant Messenger, which is a different episode of the show. Oh, can I be invited back to 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. Yeah, the closeout Trio 650. Yeah. All right, so.

Let me just tell you the story of BBM 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 other hand. 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 the 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 IMing. That was like the big takeaway. It's like all the young people are IMing. And this is not like texting. This is IMing. They were like sitting at the family computer on AOL Instant Messenger, which I did. Authorizable. That was my entire life. I was, again, in college because you were a little baby. Correct. Yeah, you were still drinking a bottle and eating food. Instant Messenger defined college at that point because we couldn't communicate if we had left our computers. You could do T9 texting on your little crappy phone. Eli the Everman was even T9 texting.

Minnesota or wherever you were from. So disrespectful. It was Wisconsin. I knew that. And 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 was a running joke with my friends that we would only text each other, meet me at the spot, because that was, every single commercial was, like, happy teens in a G prank. We'd be like, meet me at the spot. And, like, this is all you ever texted. I feel like it was usually surfing at the spot. Right? They, like, mostly surfed wherever the spot was. But because 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'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 was interesting, but it wasn't built into Gmail yet. Nobody's really using it. But it was like all this stuff was like starting to happen. Yeah. But it was still you sent me at the spot text messages. So I 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. What's really fascinating about this at that time is even back then, everyone knew 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. Yes. Because it was like some...

I don't know, 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-sense thing is like, it was an 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 in. That's why it's 160 characters. And they just like, 10-sense 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 a 160-character text message. Come on. School. 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 this didn't eat me at the store. Bethan! It's W-U-U. Your cell phone bill is what's up. All this texting. OMG, IMBD. It is a big deal. Who are you texting 50 times a day? I decay my BFF gel.

Tell your BFF, Jill, that I'm taking away your phone. That's exactly what I'm talking about, 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 I completely forgot about is that BlackBerry launched a new app that was going to integrate all this stuff. All the stuff 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 weirder on 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 Blackberries 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. Yeah, that were actually doing the work.

Like your iPhone, it was VS, BlackBerry Impressor. And that's like your business would have one. And then BlackBerry ran one for the big networks. 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 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. And so they're like, okay, people are emailing in real time. We can just extend that model to A1C 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 the, it did sort of happen that quickly as it seems. It wasn't, there wasn't some like grand proclamation about like, we need to embrace internet messaging. It was just like somebody just like 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. This is, if I remember correctly, it's like halfway into the movie and Jim Balsillie, who's played by Glenn Howerton, my boy, Dennis Reynolds from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, shows up and his team pitches him on a messaging app they just created. Let's just play the clip. Do you know how much it costs to send a text message? Yeah, 10 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 understand it, yeah. From what I understand it was there. And it was great. But 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 like 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 appropriate. 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 backronym. We just want to call 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, they didn't call it that. 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 like 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. It was just BlackBerry. It was part of the platform. It's like MTV or the SATs. It ultimately 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.

I was like, what does BBM stand for? Like, I don't know. What does ESPN stand for? They should have called the BM. 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. So anyway, so the app ends up launching August 1st, 2005. This all happens very fast, was what I learned. So they 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 file transfers from their existing email service. And then they added the buddy list and the pen and the reader seats. Right. It's like if you just smash BlackBerry Enterprise Server into AIM, you get BBM in a very straightforward way, which is kind of wild. And going back to this idea of what we used to do at our computers, 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 the get shit done company. We're going to let you do your work on the go. And sure, that ended up translating really well to consumers.

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. Yeah. It's like, Joanna'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.

I want to point out that David is also a fancy-pants East Coast. Yeah, he is. He was like, I grew up and I was in Connecticut and I was issued a BlackBerry by the state. By my family. You're closer than you think. David's family had a Benz 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, really was. You can tell who worked in finance because, and I have these distinct memories of getting on the train from Greenwich to New York and all like, 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.

And now, instant message. And me, I'm just sitting there, like, putting stuff in my calendar as, like, a senior in high school. Oh, there's nothing funnier than when all the high schoolers got, like, bomb pilots. And we're like, what's on your calendar? It's like, nothing. To-do list. 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. 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 in the 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 know, now end-to-end encryption on phones, it's much harder to just go to Jim Balsillie 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. And that, I think, really, that's when 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. For example, Apple and Google can just resist it because they're 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, like all the information is on that computer. Just give me that computer is like a real thing. 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 like those first years. Nobody could really explain like 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 like.

literally instantly real-time message each other. I'd also forgotten how unreliable SMS was back in the day, that like 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 than 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. Like when we would text at that, you would get like an error, like 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, like, 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 reader seats. Do you remember what they were?

D and R? You're right. It was D for delivered and R for red. 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 in A. That's perfect. That's great. BlackBerry. Anyway, so 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 was like the world's first super app. Really? Yeah, right? Some of this stuff came later. But then you could eventually post to Facebook and Twitter. 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 £3, BlackBerry users will have unlimited access to 50-person-selected songs, and then once every four weeks, you'll be able to change 25% on your list.

Now, this doesn't sound like a great deal on its own. It doesn't. 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. Or no, it's not a pan. She's pushing the phone into the shot. So thank you, TechRadar. Yeah, that's an old TechRadar video. And I just have to say that you can tell there was 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.

It's completely true. She was definitely like a launch event holding the phone and there are three comms people standing behind. We've all been through this. And eventually you become a sociopath. 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 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 friend's 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 of Justin Bieber that it's like, hide your Justin Bieber song 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 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. I did these things. Young Joanna did these things. Okay. This was their solution to that.

They're like, 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 on 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. People are BBMing. And they don't want to go to the iPhone yet because it's not on Verizon. It's not on Verizon. 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. 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. It's like, because at this point, you're right. It was the stickiness. Exactly right. You know what else would have been sticky? Taping an iPod Nano to the back of BlackBerry. A choice you could have made. 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. Do you have little gadget pockets? Like you would like.

come home at the end of the night and you 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 films for women back then. So, but like, 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 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.

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 Blackberries. But you could just run that ad about WhatsApp today. Oh, a hundred or I message. This is still how we communicate about everything, right? 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 doing? It's all the same. It's the playbook. It is wild how much of this BBM, like, got right. And then right at the end, you get 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. 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. Okay. When

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. You got bullied out of using BlackBerry. Most of my closest friends and family have 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. You 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 perception, 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. There 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 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.

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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 BlackBerry 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 the 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 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 embrace the super app idea. It's like, we're gonna go all in. It's gonna 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. 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. 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 would have 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. Yeah. Right. All the way to the beginning, like the government, just rewind your brain to be like the Federal Trade Commission and the FCC understand that AOL Instant 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. Right. And the way that it happens is when there is some sort of inflection point event. Yeah. And that thing was the iPhone. And it was some combination of the iPhone and Android, which essentially happened at the same time. It was like, it just, it unstuck the whole thing. Yep. And then in particular, 2011, iMessage is introduced. Yeah. Right. So then this all goes down. But 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 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 they had done all the software things right.

short of building better funds. 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 through 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 Bosley'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.

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. 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 a big BBM 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. They didn't follow the playbook, but they followed a playbook. Well, no, a lot of people made shitty seven-inch tablets. Like, that playbook was deeply followed. That's true, that's true. 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 is, 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 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. Everything you would own a BlackBerry for. Exasperated BlackBerry users give vent 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? Nations rise and fall on whether or not these phones pop off. His phone is not popping off. So this is what happened next. In 2013, BlackBerry, the company, is essentially falling apart. It's a mess in so many ways. It's market share is shot. And I believe this was for the great Wall Street Journal piece from many years ago, that they understood that BBM was kind of the only remaining asset of 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 alternative history to go down where BBM Inc. is 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? Within 10 million. There's your hint. Is it 10 million? It's not 10. It's more than 10 million. Oh. 6 million. Famously more than 10 million. It's not. It was 60. 60 million people still using BBM in 2013. To do what? 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 the phone? So you have no idea. This was like the total BBM. Including the weird apps. Universe. I think so. Yeah. 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. Well, 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, now the iPhone has it. 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, like, in 2013, WhatsApp already had 300 million users. So 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 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. Perfect. That's a perfect, probably on Sprint. Anyway, this is also the era of- 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 this 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. 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 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. Because there's no business models for everyone's using your network unless you have like sustained usage. 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 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 mean, Joanna's still using it when I gather.

PBM was eventually sold to somebody else. Of course. What year do you think? It's the same private equity. They wrote a sad blog post about how it was going away. What year do you think it was? 2019. 17. 19 is right. It's 2019. I prepared for the show. And they claimed there were still people using PBM in 2019. I just came here with class warfare. There's no other preparation. You get the spot. All right, we're going to take one more break and then we're going to come back and we're going to get to the version of history questions. We'll be right back.

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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 on 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 BlackBerry. Remember, they called them BlackBerrys. 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. And it's like, oh, this is hilarious. It is maybe the first example of like full-on smartphone addiction.

It was just like, because there were, like, the crackberry thing was real. 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. And, like, you can take that right out and be like, well, democracy is in danger. But, like, 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. I can't live without it.

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 BlackBerry. 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, and David, I know you have opinions on this, but you could do an away message. Yes. I know. I know you have thoughts. I do. But you could tell people your status.

in BBM. That was my answer to it. With a little emoji. And when that died, it never came back. They all have it now. You can do status in Instagram stuff. No one cares. Nobody looks at that stuff. It's irrelevant. You can do it in WhatsApp, right? 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. It was the away message. Bring back the away message. All flirting was conducted by away message. Oh, yeah. And especially... 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. 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 was I thinking? Like, 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 that dashboard concession. 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. What was the point of an away message on a phone? This is by the way, were you sending away messages on BBM? So you were like in a meeting. Yeah. In college. Well, but no, but again, it was recording the Verge cast. BBM got so quickly to that thing of like, 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 you're 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. That was doing that in college. No, no, that was in my dorm room. I 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. 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. For the youngs 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 to express yourself. And this is why you don't want it on your phone. 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 stalled and they didn't bring it to other platforms. I think I agree. I 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. Yeah, they had QR codes at the end. Let me reformulate my argument. Yes, that was also on my list. That's so funny. I don't agree. I think a number that is yours but isn't your phone number is a good and valuable thing. And the fact that all of our usernames are just our phone numbers, which are also the most important piece of personal security we have, disaster. Give me more random numbers that I can give to people. I'm fine with it, honestly. He's just like, this is your idea is 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. 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 it's like you Apple did just do all the things that like literally like in the halls of the theater. People are like, oh, Blackberry said no. 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 this is one of my favorite questions there, because there's sometimes 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 incredible. Like, all of the same stuff has been recapitulated now with iMessage in the exact same way as ByBerry. 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, 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 won. 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?

Joanna, I'm putting you in charge of BBM in 2008. Peak of its power is BBM. What are you doing differently? Same thing we've been talking about, making it available to more phones, more cross-platform, but to Eli's point, what about the rest of my hardware business? And so. Right. 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. 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, there's just not a business here. And so this is my problem too. I'm like, 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. I think any of my ideas are not actually about BBM. It's like ways to save BlackBerry. How would you save BlackBerry? Beds. But maybe, like maybe I would have made a cloud business. You can't just say that. What is the cloud? Well, this is before the cloud. Oh, you mean you would have done like a desktop messaging in the cloud? 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, 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. 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. 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. Here's unlimited storage, right? Like here's a gigabyte of email storage. And everyone thought that was fake.

Apple was 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. Remember it was a 2G phone. They didn't have 3G for another year. And they were still like, screw it, webpages. 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 were 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. 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 book. 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, no. But maybe they should 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. BMIQX is in every car. 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? It'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? 50 songs for $5 a month.

It's obviously WayMessages. I think that's right. There is 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 agreeing with the answers to WayMessages. I think Apple does it. Is it SharePlay basically that?

You don't pay for it? No, you use SharePlay. Oh, yeah, Ping. That's right. No, I don't use the social Apple music. I learned a while ago that you can use SharePlay to have the same music on two headphones. It's faster. 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 Instant Messenger did not have a proper app on these phones. Google was like, man, everyone loves Gchat. It's not even called Gchat. 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. 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. 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, that's pretty tough now. I mean, maybe for like me.

Just do it. 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 happy version of the thing? No one has yet built that thing. Because Apple won't let you in this country. True.

Just straightforwardly, you're fighting against a set of platform policies that prevent the thing from existing. Yeah, 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 trying to be like WeChat now. 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. 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. 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 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 U.S., it's always been very hard for people to grasp, I 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 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. Or if you were to try to relaunch BBM, 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, 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 library brand name and all this stuff. And, like, that's, I think the solution here is smaller and 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've left that blank because I, what are, what is. No, the answer is no. 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. 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 judging process? I'm just saying vibes. 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. And that is the argument you make for like not including like a sports player.

We should get a picture here, but not too strong. 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. Right? Agreed. We can't decide this. The answer's a hard no. Listen, you have to vote on its merits. And I think on its merits, it doesn't 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. This 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 Shurtleff. 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. Listen to Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.