Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#271

Post by reitanqild » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 4:50 AM UTC

axaxs wrote: post #42

bassman9000 wrote: post #6

Aside from Signal and Telegram, is there any worthy alternative?

I compared them all at one time. Encrypted by default was a must, the rest were excluded. Signal - Featureless Telegram - Not encrypted by default, and controversial encryption Wire - Really liked Wire, but it had a bug of not doing push notifications correctly. Many missed messages until opening the app manually and seeing them. Viber - No real complaint with Viber I guess, I don't quite remember why I didn't like i…

> Telegram - Not encrypted by default, and controversial encryption

While Telegram annoy me more and more by some of their crypto moves

this just isn't true

and we should stop spreading this lie.

Please help me stop this idea that only E2E is crypto.

For examples of not encrypted data, look at telnet and plain http, they are unencrypted protocols and anyone can read the content as it passes over their network.

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#272

Post by reitanqild » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 4:52 AM UTC

24gttghh wrote: post #82

axaxs wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I compared them all at one time. Encrypted by default was a must, the rest were excluded. Signal - Featureless Telegram - Not encrypted by default, and controversial encryption Wire - Really liked Wire, but it had a bug of not doing push notifications correctly. Many missed messages until opening the app manually and seeing them. Viber - No real complaint with Viber I guess, I don't quite remember why I didn't like i…

>Signal - Featureless Come now. Signal has group chats, document sharing, built-in GIF searching (GIPHY), disappearing messages, encrypted calling (video and/or voice), oh and the most important feature: text messaging.

Sounds awesome.

Who pays for it? (Honest question, I burned myself on WhatsApp.)

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#273

Post by lx3459683 » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 4:52 AM UTC

Synroc wrote: post #236

storgendibal wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineer with an MBA here. My two cents: Back when I was writing code, my worldview was that if engineers ran every company, then the world would simply be a better, more rational place. Because engineering is hard and everything else is easy/squishy/learnable. During my b-school classes, it dawned on me that things are much more complicated than I had thought. Marketing and sales are very hard, very quantitative, an…

I’m curious in your path. What made you decide to get an MBA being an engineer, and what are you doing now with that degree?

It's the path people take when they're not very good at engineering but want the medium bucks.

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#274

Post by pnloyd » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:02 AM UTC

anuragbiyani wrote: post #130

goodrubyist wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how you can seriously argue that $1/year is "not as inexpensive as you think." Even in poor countries, that subscription fee is ridiculously low.

Talk about living in a bubble. +everything drdaeman@ said above. There are more people using WhatsApp in India (thanks to popularity of image/video/voice-messages) than who can actually read or have usable Bank accounts. If you think they can pay "$1" for something they can get for free (and have been using for free in past), then you are completely out of touch of reality. Apart from the amount (which is not trivial…

So what's a dollar to an average Indian whatsapp user. An hour's wage, a day, week?

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#275

Post by dest » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:07 AM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #121

dest wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting info. Do you have some ressources about this effort of standardization?

https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/about/ It's progressing rapidly. Cisco, Google, Facebook & others participating.

Thanks, will follow this (we package Matrix for B2B)

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#276

Post by fooker » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:13 AM UTC

sp527 wrote: post #170

enraged_camel wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need an MBA to sell something, even when the target customer is an enterprise.

Can report from the trenches of a major software consulting firm: putting a sharp engineer who's even reasonably good at communicating in front of the C-suite is 5-20x more effective than using someone with an MBA.

But is it the best use for the engineer's time? Does the engineer want to talk to a bunch of strangers every ..say.. week?

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#277

Post by gordon_freeman » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:23 AM UTC

danirod wrote: post #14

Remember when WhatsApp required a subscription? One of the first changes made by Facebook after purchasing WhatsApp was to make it available for free. And now they're complaining they can't milk it enough? Oh dear. I know that a percentage of WhatsApp users would stop using the app if they started requiring a payment again –because apparently paying $1 per year for using an application on your $999 phone is outrageou…

I would have gladly paid $1/month instead ($12/year) even just to avoid ads infecting the app which I use most on my phone. All of my family, relatives, and friends are on WhatsApp and every type (call, video or message) of communication happens through WhatsApp but this constant pressure of putting ads in the product from Facebook is something I don't like.

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#278

Post by ian0 » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:26 AM UTC

kikoreis wrote: post #246

ian0 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't have to get everyone to pay $1 a year. It just had to get enough to pay the rent and know that eventually with improvements in payments it could get most on board a paid plan. I presume thats what they had in mind at the time, the billing was very loose, I cant recall anyone being blocked for not paying, at least here (SEA). And its feasible. Back in the day there were carriers open to chat apps (eg BBM) an…

Your post made me wonder whether I'm missing something obvious: what sort of global wallet platforms exist for underbanked users? Credit cards are the only platform I know to work reliably, but most people don't have them, and they are horrible to use online. If you don't have a credit card, what online, global alternatives exist? Paypal I guess, but using it is even harder than using a credit card..

There are no truly global ones yet (though alipay has 500m accounts). Rather a hodgepodge of companies in developing countries have been rolling out their own, with a lot of success in recent years.

The first wave was telcos, which largely failed with the exception of a tiny few (eg m-pesa in kenya, globecash in philipenes). Banks entered the frey but struggled. Then the new wave came around, led by Alipay and Wechat. They kick started their wallets by leveraging existing products (ecommerce, chat) before expanding it to point of sale. This model is growing strong (see go-pay, grab-pay, paytm).

But the whatsapp problem could have been solved by a far more traditional route. You dont need people to pay on whatsapp, but rather just need the $$ to get to whatsapp. For that type of thing electronic voucher distribution could have been leveraged, in the same way that play, games vouchers, itunes vouchers work.

So Whatsapp sell codes at a 5-10% discount to 3 large companies (paid in advance), who then onsell through a network of parties until someone wanders up to a street stall, gives a dollar-equivilent in cash to the owner of the stall and receives their code. The code when entered extends the subscriptions. Everyone in the chain takes a portion of the fee.

If your feeling particularly fancy you can replace the entire voucher with a realtime call that activates that persons subscription. But needs to be on a per-country basis.

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#279

Post by beefield » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:28 AM UTC

Smirnoff wrote: post #115

russellbeattie wrote: post #78

Whatsapp had a great business model: $1 a year. With their current 1.5 billion users, that's nothing to sneeze at. It doesn't cost them $100M a month to provide the service. I wish more companies were like Craigslist - happy to make an great profit and a lasting business by providing basic information services for a reasonable price. Instead, a bunch of MBAs want to rule the world by focusing on growth at all costs,…

Ok, I agree that some MBAs can be full of it but can we already stop this MBA hate on HN? I feel like lots of people here think that if you build something then customers will surely come. I've got a huge surprise for you. You will have to sell your product and some of the MBA's are really great at that. In B2B a single sale can make or break your company when you're low on cash. You do your job and let them do their…

> Finally, it's not MBAs who decided to focus on growth at all costs. It's the nature of the game. Either you get to the top or your competitors will do that. So don't hate the player, hate the game.

Well, I do think it is fair to make a strong connection between the whole concept of maximizing shareholder value being the ultimate corporate goal and MBAs and their education. If the ultimate corporate goal would be maximizing customer value instead, the whole social media landscape would look very different.

And the funniest thing is that nobody has ever been able to explain me why maximizing long term shareholder value would be a better goal than e.g. maximizing long term customer value. I mean, in order to maximize long term shareholder value, you need to pay your taxes and competitive prices to other factors of production like labour and debt holders and your supply chain. There is no rocket science there. And if your goal was to maximize customer value instead, of course you would need to pay competitive rates to equity holders, otherwise you could not run the company and maximize the customer value.

The corporation is an independent legal entity. The whole idea that the stakeholders who get their moneys last in case of bankruptcy and risk only the money they have invested (others are risking their careers, homes, businesses etc) are designated as "owners" of this entity is really weird once you start thinking about it.

Re: Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money

#280

Post by kamaal » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:36 AM UTC

danirod wrote: post #14

Remember when WhatsApp required a subscription? One of the first changes made by Facebook after purchasing WhatsApp was to make it available for free. And now they're complaining they can't milk it enough? Oh dear. I know that a percentage of WhatsApp users would stop using the app if they started requiring a payment again –because apparently paying $1 per year for using an application on your $999 phone is outrageou…

>>I know that a percentage of WhatsApp users would stop using the app if they started requiring a payment again

Most of their users come from countries like India(Im an Indian). Where people are very price conscious. And yes they would move on to other free services if charged.

>>because apparently paying $1 per year for using an application on your $999 phone is outrageous

Most smartphones on which people use WhatsApp in India are less than $100 phones. These days you get good usable smartphones in India for around $50 as well.

>>but I wonder why can't they just make it an option again as an alternative to ads.

Because bandwidth costs money.

Best way out of WhatsApp is to ship their app with the phone and have the manufactures charge $1 * avg life of the phone.