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> I tried to convince the CEO of Research In Motion, who I worked for, that WhatsApp would end up destroying his business. He thought I was insane for thinking something so small and simple could have such a big effect on his big, important company. Yeah, well, whatever you say, man.

Well, he had a point. What killed BB was the iPhone, not that their chat app was going to lose out to the competition. They simply had a product that was inferior in every single important way.



It's attack from both directions:

BB and BBM are network effect. iPhone alone is not enough to disrupt the social-media aspect of BBM (which was very sticky at that time in quite a few countries).

WhatsApp + Android actually killed BB+BBM in those countries and not the expensive iPhone


People owned a BB because of its built-in message service.


A lot of people liked the keyboard




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