611–620 of 831 posts
Maybe I'm not down with the kids, but I'm not understanding what any of these message apps offer over plain old fashioned email. It alerts me on my phone, it works on my computer, it sends to groups, everyone already has it, it sends photos, it stores a history of all my past communications in one place accessible from anywhere. It's not completely secure but at least you don't have to trust any foreign corporation (…
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I mean, if you assume only 10% of that value is going to employees, then you need only half a percent (0.5%) of that to get a $800k bonus. If you've only been there 2-3 years, that's a substantial bonus that pushes your pay above market rate.
You dropped a zero. 16B * 10% * .5% = 8 Million
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>>> It's gonna be one tough mission for FB to convince WhatsApp users they're not gonna be playing around with their data. It's much less relevant if you step outside the HN.
I don't know if that's true. How do you explain the success of WhatsApp when FB exists?
Speaking of reasons, I would say doing one thing and doing it well.
After FB has invested all that money, their messenger app is still behind. Sync issue was a big one. Up until recently, FB messages wouldn't reach my phone or they would reach hours after being sent. And I don't live in a forest in Africa.
Second, I find the UX poor. It's hard to point out but using e.g. WhatsApp just feels more... natural. Don't know why.
Also, I think the fact that your phone book is the first class citizen is a big one. You don't need to add, confirm anything. It's just already there. And that makes a perfect sense. If you have a phone book with all the contacts, why would you need a new list of contacts.
Basically, WhatsApp is just SMS on steroids. Taking a proven technology and improving it. That's also innovation.
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I don't know if that's true. How do you explain the success of WhatsApp when FB exists?
Well, do you really think a regular person will care a lot about storing data? Ok, maybe after Snowden's leaks they will give a second thought about sharing intimate pictures but other than that... For us, HNers, it's hard to understand 'a regular person' because we are far from. Speaking of reasons, I would say doing one thing and doing it well. After FB has invested all that money, their messenger app is still behi…
400,000,000 active users [0] 16,000,000,000 USD ---- $40 per user That's an incredible cost. We can assume Facebook is paying for the userbase, the app itself and it's infrastructure would basically run itself. It's less appealing when you realise that there's probably a miniscule fraction of WhatsApp users that don't have a Facebook account. > WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can contin…
Pretty amazing that this is precisely what Microsoft paid for Hotmail in 1998 : $400 million for 10 million users = $40 / User. [1] The parallels are striking : Whatsapp is to messaging today what Hotmail was to messaging in the late '90s. [1] http://news.cnet.com/2100-1033-206717.html
With 10 million users, you could grow 100x, or more.
With 400 million users, 100x growth is harder.
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That is a very good point, even if you don't immediately realize the deeper implications. :) In India, you generally pay per text message - so if you can convince even 3 of your close friends to start using Whatsapp, you save (say) 20% of your phone bill. Here in US, if you are going to send more than a few texts a month, you are going to be paying 20 USD. So there is no real monetary incentive (initially) for you an…
So why didn't Indian telecoms implement all-you-can-eat messaging to stop the erosion of users moving to WhatsApp?
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Yes, here's a quote from the FreeBSD Foundation's July 2013 newsletter: At WhatsApp we leverage FreeBSD and Erlang to provide industry record uptime. The ability to scale linearly on commodity hardware has allowed WhatsApp to keep our serving costs low. These days we run anywhere between 2 million and 3 million concurrent TCP connections on a single FreeBSD server... https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2013Jul-ne…
Wow! 2-3 million concurrent TCP connections? I just discovered C10K last year :( Is this a fundamental difference between thread based networking and evented network IO? What am I missing?
Many kernels can do a pretty good job at general purpose networking but at this scale you tend to care about the details and so more of these systems tend to push the decision making to the program using APIs like epoll & kqueue (Linux and *BSD respectively). Keeping this information transfer cheap for millions of sockets is not as trivial as just using the API but it's a necessary step to control overhead.
Whether your user space code uses threads in places to get work done is often misunderstood as well since thread doesn't always mean a single logical thread in a program. Erlang, in SMP mode, uses threads to run it's own process schedulers (much like an operating system). The operation of these schedulers is handled in such a way that IO can efficiently block a process and the scheduler can move onto other things in queue. So, in many ways, it's the same ideas we had on the bare OS but with more specific implementation governed by Erlang's philosophy.
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Microsoft also paid $8.5 billion for 663 million Skype users in 2011, which works out to $12.82/user.
You are comparing Skype to WhatsApp? Don't you think it's kind of apples and oranges? Skype had technology that Facebook itself uses for video chat and WhatsApp supposedly has a large user base which mysteriously enough is so different than FB user base, that it's worth $16b?
Microsoft had its own Live Messenger and Lync too, so the acquisition in both cases was for the user base and the brand than technology IMO.