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In my view, messaging is the best example of how bloat over time kills apps. Nobody actively wants to switch messaging apps, but with numerous apps that have co

In my view, messaging is the best example of how bloat over time kills apps. Nobody actively wants to switch messaging apps, but with numerous apps that have come and gone throughout the years - from icq to msn messenger to yahoo messenger to Skype to WhatsApp to kik to Line, often enough it's that the app itself gets bloated to the point where the fundamental messaging capability becomes secondary and folks move away to something that just works - or is easier and takes advantage of a new paradigm in discoverability and that becomes where you find most of your community.

btown 9y ago
WeChat is the perfect counterexample here, and I think it speaks to why a company like Amazon would love to "own the bloat." For western markets, if Apple or Facebook is equivalent to WeChat with their pervasive messaging platforms, and Amazon is the equivalent of Alibaba, then the war between them alluded to in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#WeChat_Pay_payment_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#WeChat_Pay_payment_serv... tells you all you need to know about why this is a crucial battlefront. It's one thing when bloat is from attempts at software feature differentiation; that's what kills these apps. It's another thing entirely when you're interfacing with product and payment ecosystems, when your features make you the core way in which people live their lives. It'll be damn hard to stick the landing, but Amazon absolutely has to try.
- otoburb 9y ago
  This hits the nail on the head. Western companies have seen the massive ecosystem that WeChat provides via their highly effective messaging UI and belatedly realize through their corporate and fiduciary duty bound value systems that there is a whole 'nother level they must aspire to. When web-based giants successfully developed and implemented private clouds they served as an aspirational beacon for CIOs to transform their internal technology roadmaps. CxO teams are now greedily eyeing the WeChat experience and saying to themselves "we can do that too!" in a similar manner. By the way, this type of thinking isn't confined to corporate executives -- WeChat is so appallingly all-encompassing that even pure decentralized plays (e.g. Urbit) use WeChat as a concrete instantiation of the type of end-user-experience to strive for, albeit in more user- and freedom- friendly manners.
Aileen343 9y ago
Im making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... https://is.gd/qKRnJt https://is.gd/qKRnJt

btown 9y ago

WeChat is the perfect counterexample here, and I think it speaks to why a company like Amazon would love to "own the bloat." For western markets, if Apple or Facebook is equivalent to WeChat with their pervasive messaging platforms, and Amazon is the equivalent of Alibaba, then the war between them alluded to in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#WeChat_Pay_payment_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#WeChat_Pay_payment_serv... tells you all you need to know about why this is a crucial battlefront. It's one thing when bloat is from attempts at software feature differentiation; that's what kills these apps. It's another thing entirely when you're interfacing with product and payment ecosystems, when your features make you the core way in which people live their lives. It'll be damn hard to stick the landing, but Amazon absolutely has to try.

otoburb 9y ago
This hits the nail on the head. Western companies have seen the massive ecosystem that WeChat provides via their highly effective messaging UI and belatedly realize through their corporate and fiduciary duty bound value systems that there is a whole 'nother level they must aspire to. When web-based giants successfully developed and implemented private clouds they served as an aspirational beacon for CIOs to transform their internal technology roadmaps. CxO teams are now greedily eyeing the WeChat experience and saying to themselves "we can do that too!" in a similar manner. By the way, this type of thinking isn't confined to corporate executives -- WeChat is so appallingly all-encompassing that even pure decentralized plays (e.g. Urbit) use WeChat as a concrete instantiation of the type of end-user-experience to strive for, albeit in more user- and freedom- friendly manners.

Aileen343 9y ago

Im making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... https://is.gd/qKRnJt https://is.gd/qKRnJt