BBM for Android and iPhone – will it affect BB sales?

I wonder how soundly thought the strategy of launching BBM (Black Berry Messenger) on non BB phones is. Apart from the few remaining BB loyalists (like me) who swear by a type phone with a physical QWERTY keypad, most of the others have already moved on to either an android phone or an iPhone or a Windows phone or to anything but a Blackberry.

In today’s less than ideal world there are few of us who are still deciding on whether to move on from BB. For such people one sticky factor apart from the keyboard is BBM and the tons of groups and friend lists one has made. Isn’t launching BBM on other phone platforms equal to showing the path to walk on for most undecided BB users as well as few BB loyalists?

I understand that for BB ‘services’ such as BBM will be a big business driver. Also with the launch of numerous similar messaging platforms especially WhatsApp, WeChat, etc and their growing popularity does signify future challenge for the BBM’s. However, since such ‘services’ revenue is very small for BB;It ,may have chosen to ignore that. In this case BB has not ignored it. I can only speculate that it will lead to more people moving away from BB platform to others.

Lets see what happens!