231–240 of 462 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The only thing they failed at was making money. Huh? They're all million/billionaires now. That part of the plan seems to have worked.
Because they sold to FB. I think parent meant "they failed to make money on their own"
I'm honestly not that surprised about the size. In my experience, efficiency and the number of engineers have not necessarily correlated. For example, I used to work for a company with about 500 employees (relatively large by German standards) and now work for a competing company in the same industry with less than 150 employees. The core engineering team only consists of a dozen engineers. The output is noticeably l…
Heroes are a red flag for me, as a manager, trying to build a resilient team. Which is not to say that you can't have a range of experience levels. But what happens when those heroes are unavailable? Maybe they're out on vacation, or medical leave, or they eventually retire or leave the organization because they're tired of propping it up? Heroes tend to be a single point of failure.
I don't know why people insist on using examples like this instead of the more obvious one: What if they are hit by a bus?
Any of the other examples have trivial solutions in the event of an emergency: call them and maybe offer them some money. If they are very stubborn then go to their home and beat them with a wrench. But you cannot get information from a dead person no matter how much money or how big a wrench you have, and people die suddenly every single day. That's the worst case you need to be making contingencies for.
I'm honestly not that surprised about the size. In my experience, efficiency and the number of engineers have not necessarily correlated. For example, I used to work for a company with about 500 employees (relatively large by German standards) and now work for a competing company in the same industry with less than 150 employees. The core engineering team only consists of a dozen engineers. The output is noticeably l…
Heroes are a red flag for me, as a manager, trying to build a resilient team. Which is not to say that you can't have a range of experience levels. But what happens when those heroes are unavailable? Maybe they're out on vacation, or medical leave, or they eventually retire or leave the organization because they're tired of propping it up? Heroes tend to be a single point of failure.
I thought what allowed them to get to that many users was that they were on so many platforms and that they used a large team of remote engineers in Europe to do that.
1)mobile operators charged an arm and leg for text messages, especially in developing countries
2)whatsapp did not require registration with user name and password, as their competitors (Skype, ICQ and others).
You can very easily build your own WhatsApp server today by simply deploying https://www.ejabberd.im/ on a box and using https://conversations.im/ on an Android phone.
Comments like this always remind me of that old comment on here about how dropbox could easily be recreated with fsync or something.
"The simpler product makes it much easier to maintain and scale." This is good news for the developers, the product owners and the customers. I still can't understand why today people choose a (Javascript) stack of build systems, ton of dependencies, and all kinds of exotic tech that is the latest and most hyped. As a developer you need to support this in the future. It might be nice to build today but it will be a n…
Well, WhatsApp had to support exotic cases like BlackBerry, Symbian OS (Nokia), and Windows Phone. I will say, dealing with JS stacks, seems easy in comparison to mobile fragmentation from back then.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whatsapp used to charge 1 eur or usd per year per user. Assuming a 20% vat, that’s $800M in yearly revenue. If you spend $500k per engineer per year, you’re still left with $775M to handle infrastructure and all other expenses. Whatsapp would have been sustainable without fb. That’s the regret.
Facebook to WhatsApp team in the acquisition negotiations: "If you don't sell to us, we'll build our own and offer it for free" And they would have been out of business sooner or later. There are enough people wanting to save that one dollar.
Weren't they already doing that? Facebook Messenger officially launched in 2011 (essentially an upgrade to Facebook's built-in chat functionality which existed before that) and was free, yet Whatsapp continued to grow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For all sorts of reasons, good and bad. One is that the future is unknown. Your goal might be to keep the product simple and scale to 1bn users, but you don't really know if it will play out like this. Maybe you plateau at 1m users with the initial idea and pivot the product somehow. Now the app does dating, social media or specialised communications for highway construction teams. Tradeoffs are easier to make in hin…
I think the Unix philosophy should apply here. The fact that WhatsApp did one thing well and it had a good business model (was it $1 per year?) is the important bit. When you say, “Now the app does dating…” I think the right move is to scrap the project because that’s a colossal fuckup. Unless you have Microsoft cash to have multiple colossal fuckups in a row, don’t add another dating app to your messaging app. Ergo,…
Remember this when people talk about Tether and how it can’t be real since it has X employees.