I think they're losing focus. I've started seeing cracks in WhatsApp's UI: - Some times when inserting a single emoji on a single line, in between pressing send and the message being sent, the keyboard flickers. - There seems to be a mysterious space between the Euro symbol and the next character...? That space isn't displayed on the webapp. - I had a third one that I forgot. Also bad decisions: - Logs shouldn't be b…
And Stories, what was he thinking?
Oh, that's an easy one. They want to get some of Snapchat's market share.
I think i see a pattern: WhatsApp: circumvent cellphone texting charges Airbnb: circumvent hotel laws Uber: circumvent taxi laws Amazon: circumvent state taxes Facebook: circumvent people's anonymity online Google: circumvent copyrights (take people's content slap on ads)
Of those description, whatsapp is the one that's actually the classic "how capitalism is supposed to work": provide a comparable or better service for a lower price. Amazon's era of sales tax evasion is mostly over. And if anyone is monetising copyright infringement it's not Google (who are somewhat conscientious about this after some lawsuits) but Tumblr (literally made of copyright infringing photos)
Lot of this is that Amazon has a physical nexus in most states or wants to. (And the situation with affiliates is murky.) So not much point in resisting at this point at their scale. Almost no other company collects sales tax for out-of-state sales where they don't have a physical retail location although buyers are theoretically on the hook for reporting it during tax season.
Talking with non-technical family members was hard in 2007. Partly this was because the most portable solution was a big chunky laptop and most people didn't even have that. But we can't totally separate the mobile computing devices that have appeared since then from the apps installed on them. I'd love a world where open source protocols and clients dominated, but it wasn't quite the utopia you remember.
Skype
Well, my mother can use watsapp, she could not use skype even with patient handholding.
> "Privatize the gains, socialize the losses" is undeniably a lucrative business strategy, but it's not one I particularly want to celebrate. This doesn't describe anything that AirBnB or Uber are doing. Taxis were expensive and horrible because governments created artificial scarcity via taxi medallion systems. They were "socializing the gains", to build off your aphorism. Uber re-privatized the gains by circumventi…
Taxis were mostly horrible because of pre-mobile-phone dispatch systems and expectations. That would have gotten fixed with or without Uber, although Uber certainly did push it along. But taxi medallion systems served a number of purposes. One of the big ones is reasonable regulation of taxi and driver quality. Another was keeping supply and demand balanced at a level where people didn't have to cut corners on things…
Note that none of the reasons you listed for the medallion system was "for getting paying customers efficiently from A to B". They're all secondary objectives that have little to do with serving the customer. If it was not the government, medallion system could be called a protection racket. That's why Uber succeeded.
Which is cool in itself. What is deeply regrettable is the fact that they ended up selling to Facebook and thereby contributing to Facebook's aggressive and relentless mass surveillance system.
I wonder if they also cut themselves a raw deal in selling. They could have built a whole platform on top of WhatsApp without any innovation more subtle than copying WeChat.
> They could have built a whole platform on top of WhatsApp
What if it failed?
A bird in the hand is worth more than 2 in the bush.
Here are some numbers i can't find. The number of users chatting on yahoo, aim, facebook, msn messenger, and all the random others combined when it was a thing not to care which people were using. At my job in 2011, every single member of my team was on using a different client, i was on ubuntu using Empathy. The point is, chat was already resolved, and it didn't require some sort of "quiet room or distraction free o…
> At my job in 2011, every single member of my team was on using a different client... This persists today - every single person I communicate with uses a completely different app, including SMS and email. I only know one person who uses WhatsApp, but serval have dumbphones. Coordinating with more than one person involves at least 2 chat programs and a website. "Group chats" are impossible because in 2017 we still ca…
At my job in our division we use Slack, anyone outside uses company email to get a hold of us. I'm of course speaking of work. Out in the real world with friends and family, everyone has Facebook, so it's as easy as that. I can also just text / call them. I think Discord is probably the best way to create "Group chats" everyone can just join without even having an account, and you can use voice chat or text. I've never had issues making a new Discord and linking someone to one, they always just join and it rarely dies out.
Here are some numbers i can't find. The number of users chatting on yahoo, aim, facebook, msn messenger, and all the random others combined when it was a thing not to care which people were using. At my job in 2011, every single member of my team was on using a different client, i was on ubuntu using Empathy. The point is, chat was already resolved, and it didn't require some sort of "quiet room or distraction free o…
We hear this rant on every chat-related thread. WhatsApp brought the amazing innovation of using your phone number for "login" (and later on - your native contacts as its contacts list). This enabled zero-BS onboarding, and that's why they have so many users. Thanks WA for helping humanity deprecate that horrible XMPP. I don't miss it.
People wanted free text messaging, so they used whatsapp.
If they were so great it would have caught on in the US, but it didn’t.
I live in Hong Kong and close enough to 100% of people use WhatsApp. Most businesses display their WhatApp numbers in their flyers/billboards. Also; every company, sports club, social group has a massive WhatsApp group which they use to keep people updated. It can be quite annoying, to be honest, because everyone is always constantly WhatsApping these groups at every social gathering.
Living in Asia I use nothing but LINE unless dealing with property agents.
Are you serious? Everyone and their grandma in India uses WhatsApp. It's so pervasive that it's almost like the only means of communication for people with smartphone and internet access.
I guess he meant wechat/qq,kakao and line that are dominant in other countries. Whatsapp is impressive though.
Most people seem to use LINE from what I see, living in singapore and traveling around.