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WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

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Re: WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

#181

Post by Markoff »

482794793792894 wrote: post #91
fwdpropaganda wrote: post #65

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…

WhatsApp's UI is a complete mess. Trying to explain it to my mum has been near-impossible. Starting a new conversation is done with an unlabeled FAB on the main-screen. She had no idea that that was even a button. Then there's four tabs across the top. One for taking pictures, because the Camera-App and the camera-shortcut in the conversation view apparently weren't enough, one for actual chats, one for setting your…

why you dont install to your parents Signal? that's what i did, extremely simple UI, but still knows even SMS, video and voice calls, it's gotta be easiest messenger out there full of features

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

#182

Post by cookiecaper »

pjc50 wrote: post #48
ransom1538 wrote: post #19

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)

Google (meaning Google.com, the search engine) is a flagrant copyright violator and the only reason they weren't shut down is that they became too important too fast for the judges to be willing to rule anything other than "Yes fair use works for everything they do, please don't hurt me for breaking the internet". Many smaller groups were shut down by Lady Justice for behavior very similar to Google's.

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

#183

Post by 1123581321 »

Mahn wrote: post #67
eecks wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did anyone offer him 19 billion?

Are you suggesting they never had a chance to sell for 19 billion? Because I'm pretty sure all Zuckerberg had to do was pick up the phone in 2009, or even earlier.

It's plausible. They crossed $20BB valuation roughly at the end of 2009. At that time they had 400MM users. This is about the same growth rate as WhatsApp since founding.

However, Facebook had 400MM largely North American and European users and had $1-1.5BB revenue with obvious potential for much more. WhatsApp's revenue was a couple orders of magnitude less after five years, with lower potential on its own to grow since it lacked Facebook's ability to collect and exploit data.

So, it seems like WhatsApp should be valued less than Facebook, i.e. less than $20BB, at the same stage in its life. That doesn't mean Facebook overpaid; WhatsApp's users were nearly a perfect complement to Facebook's geographically and Facebook, unlike a company like Google, had the organizational ability to allow WhatsApp to grow while benefitting from Facebook resources.

https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/tracking-facebooks-v...

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

#184

Post by inthewoods »

ramses0 wrote: post #171
inthewoods wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This allowed them to _SCALE_ revenue because they're basically dividing by zero (Income v. Expenses) Don't disagree with anything you said except scaling revenue. As far as I can tell they never really scaled revenue, but instead became such a threat to FB in terms of users that Zuck felt he had to give up a substantial portion of his company to own them. Or put another way, if FB (or anyone else) and not bought the…

Probably 20-50 people, 100-200 servers, and comfortably sitting on 10-30% of global instant messaging traffic running through their servers. If that's not somewhat interesting to somebody then I've got a bridge to sell you.

It's not a question of "somewhat interesting" - it's a question of what would be their revenue source.
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