In the words of Doctor Peter Venkman, “Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!”
That was my initial reaction to the news that BlackBerry has created iOS and Android versions of what was once the linchpin of a mobile empire: BlackBerry Messenger. Known as BBM to users, it was also the one thing that kept people on BlackBerry phones despite a lack of apps and weak hardware. Now, you can use the service on the two biggest mobile OSes out there. This, of course, begs the question: Why buy a Blackberry? If you want to try it out, you have to hold tight until this summer.
In other shocking news of companies playing nice, Microsoft has enabled chat functionality with Google users on Outlook.com and SkyDrive. With Google’s new unified Hangout protocol (codenamed internally as Babble), this new function is a potentially huge feature that should allow dedicated Microsoft users casual access to friends who live in the land of Google.
In a world where more and more companies are building walls, it’s nice to see a few of them building shared courtyards.
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