Remember when everyone had a Blackberry and the iPhone came out and people were reluctant to switch because they’d lose all their BBM contacts and that would be horrible?
It wasn’t about Security or User Experience or Pin-2-Pin communication.
It was about the People.
People who you talk to, connect with, interact with in a personal or group manner on an ongoing basis.
My kids won’t go to another phone because it doesn’t have iMessage on it and they’d be left out of the conversation, they’d miss something and they don’t want to. Sure other Universal Chat apps have come along, but the adoption and zealot level adherence to BBM, I mean iMessage, is not there.
When people cannot connect to iMessage they go ballistic (I know, I had to try and fix this over the holidays and ran through many a forum and post on it). All of us together, lost souls in front of our computer screens, trying to figure out a way to ensure our iMessage did not go down and that we’d be back up and running as soon as possible.
It’s like Marshall McLuhan said – “The medium is the message” – and it shapes how we are and operate with one another as we move from leap to leap.
BBM to iMessage to whatever but the problem still remains, when you create a communication ecosystem that is limited to only those that you can afford (the iPhone or the Blackberry) are you willing to shut out the messages from all those that don’t have the medium simply because they are not on the communication package du jour?
So when we come back around to the medium being all about the People – are we the ones benefiting from keeping in close touch with our Top Contact List or are we the ones missing out on the bigger messages?
