BlackBerry (T.BB) rolls out BBM for Windows phone users

BlackBerry (TSX:BB, Stock Forum) isn’t what it used to be and has been on the long road to recovery ever since the bungled release of its BlackBerry 10 smart phone that many felt was too little, too late.

John Chen, past president and CEO of Sybase, replaced company CEO, Thorsten Heins, back in 2013, with Chen announcing that he intended to take the company’s proprietary BBM messaging service to the world as part of a new revenue generation plan for the crumbling firm.

The company furthered this objective with today’s announcement that it had made BBM available to Windows phone users worldwide. According to the news release, the BBM app for Windows will provide features such as BBM Chats, BBM Groups, Find Friends, BBM Feeds and ‘Pin’ to Start.

BBM, released in 2005 to become one of the largest private social networks, has already been made available for iOs and Android customers, although there are plans to redesign the UI so that more closely resembles modern mobile interfaces.

John Sims, President Global Enterprise Services, BlackBerry, commented on the milestone, “As the popularity of BBM continues to grow, we are thrilled to have the opportunity to expand its availability to the Windows Phone community.”

He then concluded, “The BBM app for Windows Phone shows our commitment to supporting cross-platform capabilities, and we are excited to be working with Microsoft to deliver a new level of collaboration to the Windows Phone platform.

The market continues to dance around the company but some Stockhouse bullboarders are confident that the company will grow to become larger than it ever was.

Shares continued to be down 3.78% on the news to $10.19 per share.

Currently there are 527.0m outstanding shares with a market cap of $5.4 billion.

SRC:STOCKhouse