Blackberry Messenger: too little too late

It looks like we can strike the Blackberry Messenger from the list of competition for a unified messaging service. They just announced that it won't run on many of the current handsets that the public uses, and I haven't heard anything about it running on desktops at all.

Apple Insider reports:

When it launches this summer, BBM is expected to be a free download, and it will be available for devices running at least iOS 6 or Android 4.0.

 That is a decent portion of the available ecosystem in the smartphone community, but it still leaves many android phones behind.

In the mean time, Google has already released their entry into the messenger race that is in the lead of all the competition. Google Hangouts can run on almost all android handsets, iphone handsets, and can even run on any computer that can run the Chrome browser.

I have used Blackberry Messenger in the past, and I had hoped that it might be a viable messing system for the people I communicate with. But in light of this news, it seems that Google Hangouts is not only the best alternative, but the only alternative.