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 office" to get it where it was.
Kudos to the WhatsApp team for having this many users, but let's not forget that we had no problem chatting until the facebook, yahoo, googles broke the old protocol in favor of restricting users to their own systems.
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.
WhatsApp mainly displaced SMS and MMS, some users of other chat protocols slowly migrated, but by and large WhatsApp mainly ate cellular carrier's lunch. Hence why most carriers offer unlimited calling and texting, discouraging use is just pushing their customers to these OTT apps.
It caught on in almost all the rest of the world but because it didn't catch on in the US it means that it is shit. Yeah, talk about living in a bubble...
Back on topic, I've avoided using WhatsApp for about a year, even though everyone around me was using it. When I've finally gave in I found out that it was really, really easy to use, even on my relatively crappy iPhone4 (I'm talking about ~2014-2015, at which point that type of phone was seen as a museum artifact; I'm still using it). Sending photos was damn easy, notifications were always "right" (not the crappy shit that Skype calls "notifications") and the "last seen" future was the central point of many personal relationships (still is). Unfortunately WhatsApp stopped functioning for me about one year and a half ago (after the FB acquisition), but you can't dismiss it just because it hasn't caught up in the States.
but China is, they have it literally in their name Zhongguo (Middle earth/country), although Whatsapp didnt caught there for other reasons, since it's very skewed market
WhatsApp didn't replace internet chatting. It replaced (or maybe I should say "disrupted") SMS, and perhaps more importantly, MMS. There are two reasons: it's free, and the UX is far superior in that it mimicks how humans, especially groups of humans, communicate.
For some reason, two of the people I text most will not receive any subsequent group texts as soon as any member of the group includes an image. And two different members of my text circle cannot do group SMS, so group SMS conversations wind up being super confusing. This appears to vary by phone and provider.
Whatsapp works exactly the same for everyone I know, on every device, all the time.
The iOS app cost 1 euro for a perpetual license and there was at least an option of charging 1e/year for the android one -- don't know if it was ever tried out, though
> 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 can't group chat between 1 person on Skype, 1 SMS, and a Facebook.
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.
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.
WhatsApp's success here in Brazil can be attributed to very few reasons:
1) Worked in every single smartphone (I started using it on a very resource constrained 2010's Nokia running s60)
2) SMS was and still is very expensive here.
3) Zero friction to use: it uses your phone number as your ID and your catalog list as its own.
It was a killer combination, almost everybody here in Brazil uses it, no matter how young or how old, no matter if it is a rich kid with the latest IPhone or the poor with the cheapest phone. Even the telcos had to bend to WhatsApp strength by offering "unlimited WhatsApp usage" on very limited data plans.
Same scenario in Mexico, people in the US didn't leave SMS as fast as us because they had unlimited SMS plans. A lot of people in our countries didn't have that option, we had to pay around 20 US cents per SMS that was just insane
Same in Lebanon and several other countries in the middle east. 15 cents per SMS, now around 9 I believe. So people started using WhatsApp for all their messaging. When audio messages became a feature, people stopped using their phone service and switched to this annoying method of communication. Many people now default to WhatsApp calls for regular calls as well.
When I was there, my monthly bill was over $50 USD per month for very minimal usage of both data and calls. That's ridiculous...
Brazil has a fair new "Internet law" [1] that states, among other things that:
1) Internet providers must not log any information about users traffic, except information related to the network access itself (like the IPv4 dynamic address attributed to the user's modem)
2) Application providers must log all actions performed by its users and retain for at least 6 months.
3) Any judge can request to an application owner the complete access log of anybody.
4) If the company does not comply to the request it can be fined up to 10% of its local revenue; face temporary or permanent shutdown.
WhatsApp ignored the law for two times and a 1st instance judge ordered the temporary ban to be performed by the major network providers. In both cases the order was latter revoked by 2nd instance judges.
Keep in mind that our "Internet law" was praised by everybody, including the international community, for its explicit creation of rules for internet neutrality. Turns out that the price for internet neutrality was mandatory massive surveillance
Regarding its availability, I think it's sad that they dropped support for Symbian OS. I wonder what made them drop an existing platform - I would've understood not bothering to develop for a new one, but not drop an existing.
> Nokia terminated its support of software development and maintenance for Symbian with effect from 1 January 2014, thereafter refusing to publish new or changed Symbian applications or content in the Nokia Store and terminating its 'Symbian Signed' program for software certification. (http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/18502_New_Symbian_a...)
Outside of Ads the only people I see video chatting typically use Skype on a laptop, live video seems kind of bothersome when you can just record videos or take photos and share them for later viewing
> all of its attention has gone into making the app as simple as possible to get started with
And they succeeded. I've been using it for years and the only new feature I remember is end to end encryption, despite they probably added new features. I don't care about status and stories, if they're still there they managed not to make them in the way of people that only want a SMS alternative. This is great design.
My only wish is that they stay using the very same chatbot backend of Messenger. WhatsApp is the only major chart platform without chatbots and given it's the number one in many countries, included mine, I'm a little tired to tell customers, yes but your customers will have to use Messenger or Telegram (which many people don't even know to exist.)
The other significant feature added was voice chats. The fact that it's easy to forget or not notice is a strong indicator of how much humanity has adopted text chatting as the primary mode of remote communication.
You're right, China too. I should have said asynchronous messaging rather than text messaging. Whether short voice, text, gif, or emoji messages, the synchronous phone call is increasingly secondary.
but reason in china is overcomplicated writing system. now young people have no problem to write in pinyin, but older generation will rather send voice message, since it's the easiest way to communicate, 2nd would be handwriting, my father in law is exactly like this, not sure what kind of keyboard use my MIL, my wife is fully westernized in this aspect using google pinyin with QWERTY (!) keyboard, which is rare even by CN standard when most young people still use T9 keyboard
I'm kinda surprised to read that WhatsApp hasn't really caught on in the US—in the sense that not everyone you know uses it (on the contrary, very few do).
Here in India, the term 'whatsapp' has creeped its way into regular hinglish (mix of hindi and english) that most working professionals speak in. All schools, colleges, offices and even parents use WhatsApp groups to communicate. It has simply been embraced as the default place to communicate. Even drivers and servants on my contact list put up WhatsApp stories and send broadcasts; the intuitiveness of its adoption truly amazes me!
In India, Whatsapp is HUGE. I would go as far as to say if it were to go down for a day, we will see a dip in the per-day GDP. It is not that so much business is conducted on it, but also it is the dominant social messaging glue.
Whatsapp probably has about 220 million users in India[1] and also because of dwindling mobile data prices, it also has now become the alternate voice channel [2]. Also I read that 90% of all smart phones in India have Whatsapp installed.
WhapsApp could probably monetize there by tacking on a payments system, possible a bit paypal like. Could make money and not annoy existing users much beyond an extra button they don't use.
This is in the works, as far as I remember. They plan to plug into the UPI (financial service by the government) to bring P2P payments. Will be quite the gamechanger, especially with how popular Paytm (another p2p payment method / wallet app) has become with shopkeepers and the like.
just copy what WeChat did, when in China you have no problem to pay to beggar by scanning his QR code, pay for 1RMB (0.15USD) ice cream in corner shop or to any illegal street food vendor, it's really embraced everywhere since all both parties need is phone and no needd to pay any fees to bank for POS terminal
not saying it's necessarily better than cards, since it came out of necessity when POS terminals are not as widespread as in west, but it's interesting alternative
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.
And sometimes you don't. Zuckerburg famously had the chance to sell out for billions quite a few times [1], and basically said, "I'm doing what I want to be doing. If I sold out I would just start another social network company and I already own the best/biggest one."
edit: Closer and better quote. Thiel's paraphrase of Zuckerburg, "I don't know what I could do with the money. I'd just start another social networking site. I kind of like the one I already have."
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.
> Sharing metadata with Facebook will be WhatsApp's undoing, mark my words.
It pains me to say this, but almost nobody cares. Many people don't even know that Facebook owns WhatsApp. Most people don't care about how privacy-intrusive Messenger (or whatever Facebook's chat app is called nowadays) is, and WhatsApp is less intrusive than that (at least the data is e2e encrypted). I don't see any undoing in sight, unless the competition steps its game up a whole lot.
> I don't see any undoing in sight, unless the competition steps its game up a whole lot.
Due to network effects, competitors can't really have a big impact on reducing WhatsApp usage unless something scandalous and hugely worrisome (to the general public) happens with WhatsApp, which then causes many people to ditch it.
I don't use WhatsApp because it's owned by Facebook. So my following comments here should be taken with a pinch of salt. Telegram, which I do use, has been on a rapid pace of development for at least a few years now. If I had to guess, I'd say that Telegram likely provides a much faster, better and richer experience compared to WhatsApp. Just a few features that come to my mind on Telegram that I like and value - username (no need to reveal one's phone number to others), @replies to tag users, cross platform/OS and cross device sync, great search (global as well as within a conversation), and message editing and deletion after sending. Telegram also has bots, money transfer and other features. I'm aware of the comparative security related weaknesses in Telegram, but other ones (like Signal and Wire, more so Signal) that are better on the security front have a long way to go to catch up with Telegram on reliability, features and UX.
Telegram has become more and more popular in my network, and part of what makes it work is that for the most part it doesn't really complicate things too much to use both WhatsApp and Telegram. It's not ideal, but largely frictionless.
The one issue I have with Telegram is that starting at least six months ago there can be a huge delay in message delivery. Sometimes easily half an hour after a message was sent. Does anyone else have this experience?
Only thing I can think of other than Telegram just getting worse in this regard is that perhaps they 'punished' me because I've been experimenting with bots. It's almost enough to make me stop using it though, as push (or near-instant) message delivery is rather important...
> The one issue I have with Telegram is that starting at least six months ago there can be a huge delay in message delivery. Sometimes easily half an hour after a message was sent. Does anyone else have this experience?
I haven't experienced such long delays with Telegram. It takes a few seconds, though I will admit that message delivery seems to have slowed down compared to how it was a few years ago.
Stories + Camera + Pictures is all Zuck. (Global Facebook theme: "Take pictures, tell stories, connect with real people.")
Otherwise the comm's platform will just degenerate into shitposting, memes, and politics. Make it easier / more natural to share "real" pictures, not meme-y text.
You'll see it "universally" in all their apps... each done slightly differently to account for differing user-base habits, but the core idea is the same... suck oxygen from competitors, and push forward with tools for OC and not reposts (original content, aka: real-user-sharing).
I really didn't care either. Then we went on a family vacation and instead of sending pictures to everybody all the time, I put a couple on my status every other day and told people if they're interested, they can look there.
I must admit it was a fun experience watching people check them out (you can see who looks at your status) and a few fun conversations started through it. Definitely a better option than firehose blasting everybody with your vacation pictures directly. (Hardly anybody in even my extended family uses facebook, btw.)
As for swiping left: That's just the alternative mode for tab switching, swiping right gets you to "status". I agree that it doesn't need a camera tab, though.
The social aspects are huge in Asia. How important is it that you can send an audio message instead of text to you? Again, probably not at all. In China, it was the single differentiating feature that led to Wechat's rise. My preferences does not integrate into our preferences.
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 status, because that's clearly a similar action to chatting and should therefore be placed in a tab next to it, and one for calls, no idea why that's not just a button in the contacts list.
Then when you go into the conversation view, at the bottom you have a generic attach media icon, a take-picture-and-send-it-shortcut and then separate from that the send-voice-message button, sharing its place with the actual send-message button. That might've been clever design at some point in the past, but now you have those other buttons right next to the send-voice-message button, so it should share the look with those as it does a very similar thing.
Also, the unlabeled movie-camera-icon at the top does not mean sending a video, it means starting a video call. You could sort of guess that by the location of that button, but that's still not just obvious, especially not for my mum.
Where you can however now send videos from, is the Emoji-selector. Or well, it's rather GIFs. Reaction-GIFs, even. Which is why I'm not completely opposed to them having placed it there instead of in the attach-media-dialog, but now you have 9 tabs at the top of the Emoji-selector and three tabs at the bottom (also including the search), as well as a delete-key, which does not behave like a tab. And two of these tabs even share the same icon.
Moving on, when you mark a message for selection, you get 5 icons at the top. Two of those are the exact same arrow-icon just mirrored. One means "Reply", the other means "Forward". Even knowing that there's a difference, I couldn't tell you which one means which without first long-pressing on them, which my mum won't know to do.
Also, one of those 5 icons is a star and when you long-press on it, it literally says "Star". Not "Favourite", not "Remind me", not "Mark as Important". I don't even know what it does myself, so I can't tell you what it should say there.
Some of these problems are hard to avoid or hard to get right, but many of these are there, because they absolutely did not focus on being a chat application and instead had to turn the whole thing into everything and the kitchen sink, and then they're even making the individual features compete for a spot in the directly visible GUI, no matter how much it clutters things up, just because they want people to use them.
All of those things are pretty minor and employ fairly standard design patterns. I think you're exaggerating a bit here.
The app is quite streamlined, especially compared to other apps like Facebook Messenger or Skype. I think if you were to remove any of the main features at this point, people would complain and jump ship to another app.
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
With the network effect, if you are above a certain threshold then suddenly everybody will use your app. So the number of users is either low, or it is near the maximum number of users. This means that there is little information in the actual number of users.
Anytime you have a network, the value is said to be proportional to the square of the number of connected users. This is known as Metcalfe's Law. Is it just another vanity measure? I have no clue.
Software success is different for the medium you are in B2B or B2C and then also the market. Chat market is pretty crowded so you're going for quantity.
If I have a B2B tool and it's fairly niche I might only need 100-200 clients but I charge them more :)
I think WhatsApp is where Twitter was during their Ascend-to-protocol Vs Just-push-Ads phase[1], only that WA is dead-set on not going down the Ad route.
IMO their options are whether to become an app platform for businesses(Service delivery, payments, shopping) or to become a user-data source for FB.
KIM that they are naturally competing with IG & FB.com in generating revenue for FB Inc and subscription isn't working for them(mostly because of almost zero app-buying & digital payments culture in places where WA is popular).
It's super easy to focus on a single metric (user growth) when you have a seemingly unlimited amount of capital and have no immediate pressure to turn _any_ revenue/profit. This article does a massive disservice to those who are not as fortunate who will inevitably be lead into failure.
Note, this should not discredit the more interesting and glorified aspects of WhatsApp (strong leadership, technical aptitude, tech stack, etc).
Did you read the article? They're explicitly not focusing on user growth:
"But while Facebook has long prided itself on the way its growth team has turned attracting new members into a science, Koum is equally proud of the fact that WhatsApp has not done so. Instead, all of its attention has gone into making the app as simple as possible to get started with—it doesn’t even require you to create a user name or password—and so useful that you’ll tell friends and family about it."
And that's consistent with what I've read of their pre-FB approach. During that period, they definitely didn't have an unlimited amount of capital. They got to 250m users (as of June 2013) [1] on only $8.3 million [2].
So no, I don't think this does a disservice. Especially when you compare it with things like Juicero, which rode a wave of hype into a $120m failure (14.5x what WhatsApp spent). Hype can get you money, but unless you focus intensely on user experience and user value you won't build the audience you need to succeed.
— "Continued growth, it turns out, was one of the main reasons Koum agreed to the Facebook acquisition. The deal allowed WhatsApp to concentrate on growth without worrying too much about revenue."
To me there's a giant difference between people focused on growth for the sake of growth and people trying to make a valuable product that is then rewarded with growth.
As an example, look at Google in the early days. They were mainly focused on making a great, valuable product. Growth was a consequence of that. In contrast, look at all the people that glued gamification, growth hacking, etc, onto mediocre mediocre products. As with things like MLMs, a growth-first focus can get business results, but I think it's a very different mindset than, "Let's make a product people love."
Growth is surely a useful metric for them, and from that quote, it looks like it's a goal. But a goal is different, broader thing than what one focuses on. Compare people who want to be, say, great athletes (and therefore famous) with people who just want to be famous. The former will focus on doing the hard work; the latter will be more inclined to chase self-promotion and attention directly.
You are quite correct, and indeed they surrendered a considerable number of potential users by refusing to make their app easily usable on a tablet or other SIM-less device.
Which is a very interesting and rare example of prioritising one aspect of UX by completely sacrificing another.
How is that not applying a focus on "user growth"? Just because you're not "growth hacking" or "using a a growth team" doesn't mean you are not implementing a strategy of growth of a user base. Adding a paywall or an advertisement would actively thwart the "simplicity of getting started", and thus halt user growth. My point still stands - most businesses who didn't have the type of capital backing that WhatsApp has would be insolvent or have to actively cause friction in their sign-up process to remain solvent (and hence halt user growth).
> Especially when you compare it with things like Juicero, which rode a wave of hype into a $120m failure
No one was comparing it to Juicero...I have no idea how that's in any way relevant...
Please understand some of the details about _HOW_ WhatsApp did what they did.
Focusing on reach (ubiquity is an innovation). Focusing on operational efficiency (a low-cost tech company is an innovation).
The apocryphal stories about WhatsApp in support of the two above points are:
1) Supporting J2ME clients (ie: dumb-phones) ... connecting "poor people" in dumb-phone countries w/ "rich people" in smart-phone countries (for $0.99 app).
$0.99 / user * 25% of your userbase isn't enough revenue for most companies to be successful.
2) Be operationally efficient, reliable, and lean. How? By running like 10 erlang servers (targeting peak message transmission RATES, not all-time storage of messages or number of users)
This allowed them to _SCALE_ revenue because they're basically dividing by zero (Income v. Expenses) if they're extremely lean on number of employees, maintenance, and operations costs.
Therefore: it compares extremely well to Juicero as a counter-example.
>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 them, where would they be?
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 super easy to focus on a single metric (user growth) when you have a seemingly unlimited amount of capital
Where are you getting this from? Whatsapp was a very lean shop _because_ they had very little capital to work with. Even after Sequoia came along, they sailed a tight ship.
They didn't lose SO MUCH MONEY, that's the thing. The article link points that out. They "lost" money on paper by handing out stock/equity to attract talent. Their actual financials, while underwhelming, looked solid.
WhatsApp was a very lean shop (and, btw, mostly (all?) FreeBSD). At acquisition, IIRC, they had about 40 employees total (or maybe it was 40 engineers).
I think if I remember correctly one of their main cost was paying a service like twilio (or something like that) to verify phone numbers of users when they registered to use whatsapp. Anybody has an idea if they are still outsourcing that verification part to a third party or doing in-house at Facebook?
They didn't burn through lots of money at all based on facebook financials. And they charge $1/month for the app (although I don't think on all platforms). I don't recall if it was + or -, but their "profitability" was less than $10 million in either direction so they weren't making or losing a ton.
I'm not sure what to tell you, I'm not fabricating the fact there was very much a yearly subscription fee associated with the app (and prior to that a price to just download the app). I'm aware it didn't apply universally which is why I specifically said it varied depending on platform.
Well, you claimed in the post I responded to a monthly subscription, not an annual one. What's a factor of twelve between friends?
My understanding is that the annual fee was essentially nonexistent, honored far more on the breach than in the observance, though all I know for sure is that they never charged me.
I have an iTunes receipt from 2013 for 69p paid for a year's worth of Whatsapp service. Their message then was "we charge because we don't want to show you ads".
IIRC they were always free in emerging markets like India though.
It varied by country. Some places it was $1 for the app. Other places, $1/year. Other places, free entirely. My guess is their goal was to make enough money to keep in the black, but to otherwise not worry too much about revenue. That let them maximize growth while avoiding the headaches and dilution of raising money.
Here is Jamshid Mahdavi talking about their stack as well but focusing on development, testing and shipping code. Some of the stuff they do will surprise you if you've been at a shop with a large QA team and deployment pipelines with many stages.
Sorry but I don't agree with the statistic of the Status feature.
> the company announced that 250 million people—a quarter of all members—were using it daily
Just had a quick look, and I have around 150 contacts on WhatsApp (mainly the Snapchat/Instagram users age group) and not a single person has set one of these photo statuses right now. I only ever recall seeing one once, since the feature launched.
If I open up Snapchat/Instagram I will literally see hundreds. Unless it's become very popular within a certain country, or another age group I find it hard to believe that it's reached anywhere near the size of Snapchat's user base.
Are you in the States? I have heard that Whatsapp is much more popular outside the US.
I live in the UK and everyone I know uses Whatsapp as their main method of communication while Snapchat activity seems to have dropped very quickly, perhaps in favour of Instagram, in my experience anyway.
Your list is preposterous. Even if you take all your other items at face value, you make it sound like "circumventing cellphone texting charges" is breaking the law or something, as if ridiculous texting charges are set up for the good of anyone besides big telcos.
It's not preposterous, it's exactly right. SMS text messages were a something like $15bn industry before whatsapp got between them and the customers, and that has value.
The list is preposterous because the title was "I think I see a pattern", and all the other examples given were breaking laws or some other nefarious goal (and I'd emphasize those other examples were clearly taken from the point of view that these companies were doing something bad). The implication was that "circumventing texting charges" was somehow stealing from telcos.
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.
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.
And one of the interesting questions for me is "where does 'cheap' come from"?
In the case of WhatsApp, it came from telco monopolies overcharging for a particular use of data. I'm certainly ok with that.
And I was initially excited about Airbnb, rideshare, etc, because some of the cheap comes from finding underutilized resources (an apartment that happened to be empty for a few weeks, people who were going somewhere anyhow) and putting them to work.
But I find the second-order effects fascinating. Certainly some of Airbnb and Uber's cheapness comes from dodging regulation and shifting costs onto other people.
"Privatize the gains, socialize the losses" is undeniably a lucrative business strategy, but it's not one I particularly want to celebrate.
> "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 circumventing this ridiculous system, and we're all much better for it.
"Socializing the losses" refers to groups getting bailed out on taxpayer dime when they fail, and nothing even resembling that has happened with AirBnB or Uber.
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 like taxi maintenance just to survive, which helped keep taxi fleets safe. A third was setting up a reasonably livable wage for career taxi drivers. A fourth, at least in some cities, was creating a de-facto retirement system: since drivers had dibs on medallions, they could invest and create an asset that would fund their retirement. A fifth was creating a revenue stream for cities to that helps pay for regulatory and road costs. Those are off the top of my head; I'm sure there were more.
Now instead a lot of those costs are borne by other people. Uber has shifted capital and maintenance costs entirely away from cab companies and on to random people desperate enough to drive for Uber. Losses are no longer the problem of the cab company, but individuals. When those drivers go bankrupt, society bears the costs. When those drives use public assistance [1], society bears the costs. When they retire and we make up for their lost retirement savings, society bears the costs. And that's to say nothing of the direct and indirect societal costs that come from more traffic.
Similar issues come up with Airbnb. E.g., if you thought you were living next to a neighbor and now are dealing with an illegal one-unit hotel in your building, you are experiencing a loss. If the apartment you rent out is trashed because somebody is running an illegal business out of it [2], you experience significant loss. When rent goes up because people are illegally converting housing to de-facto hotel stock, that is a socialized loss with privatized gains.
I'm not even saying this is necessarily worse. As with the bankruptcy system as a whole, it can sometimes be overall better for society to pay for something. But we shouldn't sweep this stuff under the rug.
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.
Not really. Even if we accept your frame of analysis, which begins the moment somebody starts a trip and ends the moment they're done, then regulating taxi quality, driver quality, passenger safety, and paying for effective roads are all relevant factors.
But if the system isn't sustainable, then in the long term customers don't get what they want. So when we're designing society-level systems, we need to think about society-scale sustainability.
Personally, instead of our hodgepodge of retirement and health insurance systems, I think we should just fund a strong safety net out of taxes. That minimizes barriers to entrepreneurship and avoids distortions. But that's not what America had when the medallion system was being developed, so we got what we got. You can certainly propose a change to that, but if you want to be taken seriously, you have to explain how you'll solve the problems the existing system solves, or at least be honest that you're not solving them.
> One of the big ones is reasonable regulation of taxi and driver quality.
I can only imagine that someone who rarely or never travels would say something like this. The main reason I switched to uber is that taxis are universally horrible, both in terms of drivers and vehicles. It's gotten much better since uber forced them to compete, but they still generally suck.
So maybe you're right, and that was the reason for taxi medallions; but guess what? It didn't work.
> Uber has shifted capital and maintenance costs entirely away from cab companies and on to random people desperate enough to drive for Uber.
Again, this is something that I can't imagine hearing from someone who actually uses Ubers on a regular basis. Most Uber drivers I've talked to love the platform, and a good portion of them are e.g. students working a side job, none of them "desperate" people.
It is frustrating that you ignore the meat of what I wrote, pick on a couple of things you can object to, and carry on carping. I'll try one more reply and see how it goes.
> I can only imagine that someone who rarely or never travels would say something like this.
Your imagination is poor. I've lived on 4 continents and am on an extended trip even as I write this.
We're talking about different kinds of regulation. You apparently care about things being shiny; most regulation, though, is about setting a minimum bar.
In the early, high-growth days of something, regulation is rarely useful because everybody's on their best behavior. It becomes more important when things settle down into a relatively steady state. Then, the incentive to shave nickels and dimes can come out elsewhere. E.g., taxis face significant safety inspections and maintenance requirements because when you use a car as a commercial vehicle, you put a lot more miles on it and you are more likely face safety issues.
We don't yet see these problems with UberX because it has only been going for a few years, and because Uber has a strong incentive to keep from becoming an obvious disaster until growth slows and revenue gains come more from exploiting their market position.
> Most Uber drivers I've talked to love the platform
Gosh, might they have some incentive to only say happy things to you? Gosh, might there be some selection bias in your sample? Gosh, might people not talk about their pain and fears to random strangers?
>Uber re-privatized the gains by circumventing this ridiculous system, and we're all much better for it.
Who are those all? Taxi drivers or the general public? I'd rather have professional, decently paid, taxi drivers instead of amateur hour weekend drivers making minimum wage at the expense of yet another working class job.
Actually in India, I am really grateful for Uber. Previously talking to an auto rikshaw or taxi is pretty painful. They are rude, not reliable, charge a lot if you don't know the city or area. Also atleast from my talking to lot of Uber/Ola drivers is that they are earning a lot compared to their previous taxi service. So to answer your question, both drivers and public.
Did you ever use a taxi before uber? Nothing you said is grounded in reality. Taxi drivers are usually extremely unprofessional, underpaid, and horrific drivers. It's actually gotten much better since Uber came around.
People really need to specify a geographical context for discussions of Uber; I've no doubt that wyager and coldtea are both reporting their experiences, but taxis are necessarily a very local service. Clearly some cities just have really bad taxis.
In London, Uber is a taxi service. The people driving for Uber are taxi drivers, with taxi driver licenses [1], and the vehicles they drive are taxis, with taxi licenses [2]. The experience is therefore much the same. The difference arises from three things: Uber has a nice app, whereas legacy taxi offices are a shambles; Uber drivers are desperate to keep their star rating up, and so might be nicer; Uber subsidises the whole operation to win market share. The app is the only significant difference, in my experience.
Yeah same in the US. Honestly there was an under supply of cabs. The cars themselves were all uniform and weren't very clean. Cabbie drivers weren't very well paid ever. It was often difficult to pay with a credit or debit card...Uber and Lyft put so much competitive pressure on the system that cabs are nicer now.
In terms of Airbnb socializing costs, it's not the flat owner who is taking on some costs and some profit, but their neighbours, who bear the costs of noise and reduced security and community.
That's not what socializing means. Socializing means using government to redistribute costs to the population at large via taxes. Entering a voluntary private agreement where you have some obligations is not "socialization".
It's weird, you hit the nail on the head in your first line, then skip the essentials on the next line.
WhatsApp: circumvent cellphone texting charges, making texting cheaper
Airbnb: circumvent hotel laws, making staying anywhere cheaper
Uber: circumvent taxi laws, making taxis and flexible transport cheaper
Amazon: circumvent state taxes (and VAT, until recently, and still the case in Europe, Australia and I'm sure many other jurisdictions), making getting mail-order goods cheaper
PS for Amazon: and also making mail-order a great deal faster.
PPS for Amazon: also cut out many middlemen to make things cheaper.
Facebook: make advertising to particular groups, accurately identified, a LOT cheaper
Google: Make it a lot cheaper to find things online.
But Why stay in tech ?
Aldi + their discounter competitors: Make groceries a lot cheaper by cutting out the middleman
GE, in their day: Make lighting and anything that could be done cheaper electrically a lot cheaper. Or possible at all in the first place.
VW, in their day: make owning a car a lot cheaper.
GDF/Suez: make transporting goods from Europe to Asia a lot faster (but mostly cheaper).
Keep in mind Jevon's paradox. Cheaper does not just mean cheaper, as in less dollars. It also means that whatever becomes cheaper becomes more ubiquitous. Faster. Becomes accessible for more people, either in difficult geographies, or poor, or ... It also means those things become feasible to use for various purposes that they couldn't be used for before. It means a lot more of said good/service will get used. And so on and so forth.
You want to make $1 million ? Become great in a particular subject, and consult.
You want to make $10-$100 million ? Start a company with a niche product, and do it really well.
Want to make $100 million - $1 billion ? Start a company and bribe the government, so that it either pays you directly or forces loads of people to pay for your services (lots of these in Washington and Brussels)
You want to make $1-$10 billion ? Make some stupid ubiquitous product cheaper. Think the most moronic normal things in existence. Breakfast cereal. Grapes. Web search.
As an aside, "I don't see X, therefore X is irrelevant/meaningless" is an argument whose relevance hinges on the speaker being all-seeing, all-knowing. That's always seemed an odd take to me. When somebody sees something that I don't, my goal is to see it.
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.
Asia is a continent; the biggest, and probably most diverse, continent in the world. Hong Kong was within Asia last time I checked, therefore your assertion that nobody in Asia uses WhatsApp is incorrect.
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.
WhatsApp user base is insanely impressive but it isn't even no 1 in the country Ycombinator is based in. FBM is. Then it also isn't no 1 in obvious countries like Korea Japan China Taiwan Vietnam.
While I agree that Whatsapp is the dominant chat app in Asia, it's not number 1 everywhere.
Notably - as you mentioned - Wechat in China, but also Kakao in Korea, Zalo in Vietnam and Line in Japan and Taiwan, where very few people use Whatsapp.
icq, aim, msn messenger, google talk (DOA), skype, wechat. besides widespread business adoption, what's special about this one? it's seamless to uninstall an app and get a new one. why would there be customer loyalty to this business model?
ot, i don't understand why anyone would want to get anywhere near mobile. people are too stupid to use these internet devices in moderation and it will destroy all social cohesion. it's a cash grab to the bottom as it devolves into radical groupthink, a breakdown of dialogue, and mass segregation of populations.
how is arguing about anything and everything productive or useful without domain specific expertise? how is mindlessly consuming hours and hours of infotainment benefiting anyone?
but i can instantly communicate to anyone around the world in a matter of milliseconds! your life is not that interesting, a letter sent by post every other month would probably be more fruitful to developing ideas, advancing discourse and carefully articulating thoughts. it's like correspondence chess vs 1 minute bullet matches. one is excited screaming and shouting, the other is a measured conversation and exchange. pretty sure e-mail hit that sweet spot decades ago, with bulletin boards and irc filling the less personal and more immediate gaps.
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 office" to get it where it was.
Kudos to the WhatsApp team for having this many users, but let's not forget that we had no problem chatting until the facebook, yahoo, googles broke the old protocol in favor of restricting users to their own systems.