
People are betting there is room for other social apps to compete with WeChat - forkLding
https://www.abacusnews.com/start-ups/wechat-isnt-cool-enough-kids-anymore-so-chinas-viral-king-planning-competitor/article/2177266
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dis-sys
completely out of date article written purely based on 3rd class
info/analysis.

the mentioned competitions have been there since day one, if you just look at
the second half of 2018, Bullet SMS and mtoilet tried to challenge WeChat,
both were very well funded and their investors/founders are extremely well
connected. yet both failed in months. the so called "wechat is not considered
as cool by young users" was the exact same cheap excuse used by QQ supporters
a couple of years ago, nothing new here whatsoever.

Bullet SMS initially attracted huge number of users last year, its killer
feature is its ability to convert received voice messages to text. In just
about 6 months time, without any solid evidence/data to back the claim, the
author of this article is suddenly trying to sell me the cheap story that some
random apps are going to win the competition because they are "socializing by
speaking, not texting"? Seriously?

I really hope that articles that can appear on the front page of HN should at
least has some solid info/analysis, random low quality article like the OP one
is not doing anyone good.

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tgtweak
Added to this that WeChat could trivially add voice to text and squash anyone
who happened to get any market share from that.

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solstice
I know that the Chinese language version of WeChat has been capable of doing
exactly this for several months already.

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syntaxing
WeChat isn't simply a messaging service. It's pretty much Amazon, Facebook,
Yelp, Dash, Venmo, Stripe/Paypal, Square, Wix, and WhatsApp combined. The
reach of WeChat is stupidly vast and making a competitor will be extremely
difficult.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Baby steps. Amazon was just a book store, Google was just a search engine,
Nintendo was just a cards company or something of the sort. You do not build
Rome in a day.

~~~
screye
Well, you sort of proved OP's point.

Investing in a company whos win condition is to become the next Amazon, Google
or Nintendo isn't very encouraging.

~~~
giancarlostoro
I think the beauty is that you don't invest in companies directly attempting
to be that big, companies just need to be good at what they do enough to
invest in other spaces. You invest in a company that has the potential to
dominate their existing market. Trying to be an all in one company is only
doable if you got a nation state actor funding the whole damn thing, or
someone with enough money to blow. Eventually though people start getting
suspicious about your company if it covers too much ground. People are getting
more weary of Google, Amazon and others.

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specialist
If we've learned nothing else: Instant messaging is an ever green opportunity.

