In other news … interference, BBM and money

This is a little late being published (like 2 months) due to external pressures,  however thought I should start cathcing up with posts …

BBM is used a lot by teenagers,  because it is free, allows group chat, and pictures.  Now though the old blackberrys are less popular because less parents are passing them down the line.  So a conundrum for BB,  they have decided to release BBM into the wild of Android ad iOS land to try and recapture the success.  They have a good chance of this,  because school age folks in-particular like the service, but not the restriction of blackberry only.

I don’t see this affecting, much the business communications,  even taking into account the fact that they will provide free calls and video.  I say that because if such freeness was going to work in enterprise, then Whatsapp or Kik or of course Skype would have killed the operators dead by now.

OK why is that I hear  you ask,  and again for me it comes down to two things:

Firstly: ubiquity, if I am going to call someone I want to know that it will work, and your phone number just works, regardless of the device, service provider, country of residence etc.  And … many of my voice calls are within plan and therefore free at the point of use.

Secondly: Learned behaviour,  we have for decades, just called the phone number when we want to speak to someone,  so switching to using an app, on your phone, on your PC etc is a slow transition  Look at Truphone and the like,  they survive, but are not a credible threat to the market because of this inertia in people’s behaviour.  [a little side note, truphone run on opensource platforms for their Core network,  and use a lot of Ruby,  so it can be done, and results in a cheap (relatively) and effective network,  and guess what it is cloud based. are you listening Zyg ?]

However lets hope that the product managers in charge of these systems realise that the service that will win, (and replace cheques) will be, as per above, a service that works for everyone, always.  It seems several of the schemes are restricted to a card scheme, or to a bank group.  Wrong, wrong, wrong, it has to just work regardless of who you are, where you are etc etc. Lets hope they see sense, because simple person t person will be so important in the cashless society.