

WhatsApp - Kopion
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2014/02/whatsapp/

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brandon272
Something that resonates in the article for me is that I don't understand the
utility of Facebook's big acquisitions. You see Google and Apple make
acquisitions for talent and technology to build out products they want to
launch and/or improve that ultimately drive their core business.

What does WhatsApp provide Facebook? People are talking about the value of the
user base. How is the user base more valuable to Facebook than it would be to
Wal-Mart? Is Facebook going to merge WhatsApp accounts into FB accounts and
the WhatsApp platform into Facebook Messenger? Ditto for Instagram. I'm not
sure what advantage that provided to Facebook. As far as I can tell it's an
entirely separate products and platform and user base.

If anyone has insight on this, please enlighten me!

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krick
Here's pretty realistic article:
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2014/02/20/5-key-
rea...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2014/02/20/5-key-reasons-
whatsapp-is-worth-19bn-to-facebook/)

I don't have an opinion on that topic, but probably just data mining on the
set of WhatsApp users can be pretty useful.

What is more interesting for me is why WhatsApp is so popular? It's not
unique, is it? Why is it so special?

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qw
I haven't used WhatsApp, but from what I can tell it runs on a lot of
platforms, including feature phones. An iPhone app is of no use to someone who
can't afford one.

Perhaps there are more affordable cheap Chinese Android phones these days, but
WhatsApp started in 2009

It's also a network effect where people use it because their friends use it. I
have the same questions about Craigslist. There were certainly a lot of free
competitors at the time, but somehow they managed to attract users.

~~~
krick
Oh, feature phones… Yeah, that must be it. I was thinking about smartphone
apps. Skype has been around for years even before smartphones became popular.
Last smartphone I had was way before Android was born, so I can't exactly name
rivals of WhatsApp, but I'm sure I heard about many of them even before I
heard about WhatsApp. There're many messengers (even completely free ones),
there're bridges between them, there's Viber. But, yes, availability on
feature phones explains a lot.

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ivraatiems
I enjoy articles like these because I have a certain inborn hatred of social
media and social networks, and I get schadenfreude from seeing them fail.

That said, I'd like to believe it - that Facebook and Twitter are happenstance
lucky breaks, and not worth all that - but things are worth what we say
they're worth, and you could have made the same arguments about Gates and Jobs
twenty years ago.

I'll wait to proclaim Facebook's imminent demise until there's actually some
"next big thing" out there.

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kschroeder
I don't know the actual reasons, but people are looking at the question from
the perspective of "what does Facebook get out of this" when the opposite
might actually be true. They may have seen that someone else could buy up
WhatsApp and pose a real threat to Facebook's market share. So it might be
entirely possible that this was a defensive buy. If spending $16 billion now
meant that you didn't have to spend $50 billion later on it would make sense.

One does not simply spend $16 billion without giving it a good deal of
forethought why.

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Blinkky
This article is terrible.

> Amazon has stayed ahead by creating the Kindle, in-house.

Is he suggesting that the only way to be innovative is through hardware?
Facebook has gone through many changes over the years, adding the wall, adding
photo sharing, and a host of other things. To say

> Facebook innovation is centered on changing privacy and advertising policies

is just plain wrong. Also

> One can even argue he stole his original idea from the Winklevosses.

sounds like he watched The social network to many times.

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ksk
"Not Innovative" is a rather weak criticism to lay on someone. I'd be
impressed if he actually produced some examples of "creativity" of his own as
to what should be done by FB. But the moment a tech writer opines on the
specifics, rather than generalities (as many often stick to), they're going to
run into a wall of hurt with comments calling them out for being idiots
themselves :P.

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paxtonab
This article is nothing but a sensationalist headline that makes little sense
and has even less substance. The following quote sums this up:

>Recent studies show that few post and no one clicks through on likes, what’s
a poor boy to do?

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jhnhrpr
This was written by Bob Lefsetz, who is a music business blogger.

~~~
smacktoward
Yep. His main blog is here:

[http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/](http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/)

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JacobH
He seems more into politics than anything else these days.

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clubhi
That's the best kind of bankrupt.

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kailuowang
He is a business man.

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michaelochurch
Flagged. This is almost a hit piece.

 _One can even argue he stole his original idea from the Winklevosses._

I can believe that someone would say something that stupid, but not under his
real name.

We're done here.

