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> For Messenger, I think differentiation is extremely important and something we haven't focused on yet. We've spent the past 6-12 months catching up to WhatsAp

by dilap 4y ago

> For Messenger, I think differentiation is extremely important and something we haven't focused on yet. We've spent the past 6-12 months catching up to WhatsApp and competitors on table stakes like performance, reliability, pushability, etc. This work isn't done and we will continue to do it, including catching up in areas like groups. > But to get people to ditch WhatsApp and switch to Messenger, it will never be sufficient to be 10% better than them or add fun gimmicks on any existing attribute or feature. We will have to offer some new fundamental use case that becomes important to people's daily lives. They never did catch up on table stakes, nor did they discover that new fundamental use case. But they had a good fallback plan: Just buy WhatsUp. Bummer for the users, though. I find myself wishing something along the lines of antitrust was enforced more rigorously to help preserve competition.

EGreg 4y ago
Our of curiosity, what was so hard for FB to have reliability, performance… and what exactly is pushability? Is it because the whatsapp dudes used Erlang?
- bryan_w 4y ago
  When you have 1000+ cooks in the kitchen, all being judged by how many new features they can pump out, just doing: import fbcorelibs; Creates a 250+mb ios/Android binary that bump against app store limits
- bcit-cst 4y ago
  yeah I was thinking the same thing? Maybe its something to do with CD/CI. being able to push changes to end users fast ?
deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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jgalt212 4y ago
> Bummer for the users, though. The game's not over yet. Maybe Meta sells, or is forced sell, WhatsApp. Or maybe people move on to the new thing.
neodymiumphish 4y ago
I think they did, just not in the way they expected. They've developed a messaging platform where finding the user you want to message is handled outside of something as arbitrary and transitory as a phone number. For example, military members (in the US) rely heavily on FB Messenger because deployments, short tours, and overseas assignments kill the reliability of using a regular phone number to maintain contact with friends and family. Messenger handles that by connecting via Facebook and maintaining that connection regardless of the users' phone numbers or email addresses.
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  Thats the norm, not the exception. Back in the early days that was the only way these services operates: AOL IM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, IRC, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, Skype, MySpaceIM etc. Even now you have Discord, Slack, Steam Chat… and that’s before you start taking federated services like (Matrix and XMPP) or other social networks (like Twitter, Reddit, etc) into account. This shift to using mobile numbers is a recent change. And not one I’m particularly fond of either.
- aeyes 4y ago
  When your phone number changes, WhatsApp asks if you want to change your number. You don't have to accept this, it will work fine on your old number. It is risky if you lose the SIM card but it works, I continued using an old number for three or four years after changing numbers and I was never forced to prove that I still was the owner of the old number.
  - RF_Savage 4y ago
    And when your old phone number gets re-used by the telco, some random person will start getting your messages. A friend was quite freaked out when multiple afgans started messaging him on whatsapp on their "new" phone number. Apparently it formely belonged to a member of the local afgan diaspora. Thankfully they ware able to get a new number from the telco to deal with it.
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    This works until the current owner of the previous number installs WhatsApp.
usrusr 4y ago
Bummer for the users? I'd say Zuckerberg is the clear loser in this story: what could be worse than failing to catch up with WhatsApp and discovering a new fundamental use case? Failing, then spending an obscene amount of money on buying WhatsApp, then seeing a considerable part of that money enabling the Signal Foundation and watching Signal eat up the user base of both WhatsApp and the Facebook Messenger. Users are fine.
- badkitty99 4y ago
- VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
  > watching Signal eat up the user base of both WhatsApp and the Facebook Messenger Is this actually happening or just wishful thinking
  - hbn 4y ago
    Telegram has made some impressive strides over the past few years (it's quite mainstream as a messaging platform and social platform in some countries) I don't think I'd say the same for Signal though.
    - wowokay 4y ago
      Idk, I feel like Telegram is viewed more like a subscription based twitter feed. It’s more about pushed updates to groups of people then communication between loved ones. (It’s also used a lot as a support medium, although I wouldn’t considered forced adoption for support or even notification as an indication of user adoption that’s like saying EV adoption is trending up while some areas almost force conversion).
  - usrusr 4y ago
    Definitely happening in my little corner of humanity. Not happening as in usage of the Meta messengers has dropped to zero, but it's becoming more and more like "funny how this group is still on WhatsApp, do they live under a rock?" At least FB messenger has a tiny niche left as the way to communicate if you are connected on FB but haven't shared phone numbers.
marcosdumay 4y ago
It's telling that Watsup did never "catch up" on performance reliability, and pushability. They started top notch on those, and if anything, moved down a bit with time. That's because you simply can't catch up on those. It's not something that happens inside the constraints of software development. That's why Facebook didn't. "Catching up" is even a very weird way to say it. That wording implies Watsup was a huge entrenched company with a lot of resources spent on development, and Facebook was a nimble team that was working hard to add enough development effort to be an equal.
thomasahle 4y ago
> They never did catch up on table stakes What didn't they catch up on? To me Messenger seems like a better user experience than WhatsApp or any of the other three messaging clients I need to use. Indeed WhatsApp is lacking basic functionality like a desktop app. Also, a client tied to a phone number may work well for some people, but a pain whenever you change your number, and it makes discovery of people much harder.
- jowsie 4y ago
  WhatsApp has had a desktop app for years.
  - dnissley 4y ago
    Does my phone need to be on/connected to the internet for it to work? That's always been the weird thing for me about Whatsapp, is that your phone seems to be the "server" for the app.
    - tomjohnneill 4y ago
      They fixed that fairly recently.
    - ascar 4y ago
      Since a few weeks/months ago, no. Before that yes.
      - WilTimSon 4y ago
        Except now it won't sync older messages and sometimes messages only get delivered to your phone but not the desktop. They took a decade to roll out a desktop app and even then it's a mess. WhatsApp has been degrading under Meta's ownership.
  - thomasahle 4y ago
    The old website/app was very primitive. Only this year did multi device linking come out of beta.
root_axis 4y ago
Why was it a bummer for the users?
- afavour 4y ago
  Lack of competition. Don’t need to compete with WhatsApp once you own it.
menzoic 4y ago
They didn't need to since they bought WhatsApp
wutbrodo 4y ago
> They never did catch up on table stakes, In what sense? The table stakes of boring functionality seem to me to be much better implemented in messenger than whatsapp. Everything from a more intuitive UI to a web option is better done in messenger.
el_nahual 4y ago
And yet their purchase of WA shows Zuck's ruthlessness and business genius. He saw his team fail to beat WA, he realized they would never beat them, and he made a decision to buy WA for what was an insane price. 16 billion dollars for a 24(?) person company with no revenue. I think 99% of executives on earth wouldn't have made that decision. They would have believed their teams that said victory was around the corner, or deluded themselves into thinking success was inevitable, or would have been afraid to demoralize their team, or would have rationalized away why messaging wasn't important after all. He just acted and won, for what now seems like a bargain.
- edmundsauto 4y ago
  WhatsApp had revenue; part of their “what could have been” tragic narrative was they charged $1/yr, iirc.
  - justapassenger 4y ago
    Most of users never paid it, and skeleton of the team they had was supported also by contractors, and most importantly, ignoring any abuse. That was ok in those days, but it wasn’t sustainable as they grew. Dealing with abuse, spam, misinformation is very costly, even when you’re e2ee.
    - 0des 4y ago
      what is misinformation?
      - danrocks 4y ago
        It’s when you disagree with me.
        pocket_cheese 4y ago
        I don't trust big tech to regulate truth, but let's not dismiss misinformation with such broad strokes. There are deliberate attempts by politically and monetarily motivated groups to spread objectively false propaganda. FUD/HODL to mislead investors, conspiracy theories to sway public opinion, pseudoscience to peddle ineffective medical treatments... The people doing this effectively aren't individuals disagreeing with mainstream discourse, they know exactly what they're doing.
ksec 4y ago
>Just buy WhatsUp I mean you could just tell how unpopular WhatsApp is in the US. I still remember no one in the US have heard of Whatsapp when Facebook announce the 16B acquisition. But WhatsUp could certainly be another Startup idea.
- copperx 4y ago
  WhatsApp is like the metric system. Used almost universally, except in the US.
- 2143 4y ago
  I went to college in the USA, and none of my classmates had any idea what WhatsApp is. Funnily enough, my US university's "international office" (the department that deals with international students including facilitating visas, travel signatures, SEVIS, resolving other confusions of international students etc) setup a WhatsApp group to communicate with all international students because that's the one app all of us had in common.
missedthecue 4y ago
As far as I can tell, there seems to be a great deal of competition in the messaging app space, in addition to Whatsapp and Messenger, you have Hangouts, Signal, Viber, Telegram, Wire, Skype, Slack, Discord, and of course good old SMS. And these are just off the top of my head. I would not be surprised if we see more consolidation in the sector.
gernb 4y ago
I know everyone else in the west seems to use WhatsApp but in my social circle I connect to nearly everyone via FB Messenger. I have but don't use WhatsApp. I have no idea what it provides that FB Messenger doesn't provide and better. I don't need a phone number for FB Messenger. I can access it trivially at messenger.com, no need for the crazy QR code non-sense of WhatsApp. I also do not have to give FB Messenger access to my contact list, unlike WhatsApp (maybe that's changed but it used to be required).
- morelish 4y ago
  WhatsApp doesn’t provide anything messenger doesn’t. As far as I can tell, WhatsApp as a product reached its ‘market fit’ years and years ago, in that they stopped bothering trying to add anything to it. Real pity in some ways its not even slightly extensible
  - Matl 4y ago
    > WhatsApp doesn’t provide anything messenger doesn’t. People say Telegram provides everything Signal does too, but seem to forget about E2E by default.
- AdvancedCarrot 4y ago
  Main thing is vastly better privacy. Messenger doesn't use E2E encryption and has no options for disappearing chats. Facebook can and do read your messages at will.
  - ffzdmfkdk 4y ago
    Messenger has E2EE and disappearing messages now as well.
nnoitra 4y ago
Why was WhatsApp so popular though, wasn't it just another chat app for mobile?

by dilap 4y ago

EGreg 4y ago

Our of curiosity, what was so hard for FB to have reliability, performance… and what exactly is pushability? Is it because the whatsapp dudes used Erlang?

bryan_w 4y ago
When you have 1000+ cooks in the kitchen, all being judged by how many new features they can pump out, just doing: import fbcorelibs; Creates a 250+mb ios/Android binary that bump against app store limits
bcit-cst 4y ago
yeah I was thinking the same thing? Maybe its something to do with CD/CI. being able to push changes to end users fast ?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jgalt212 4y ago

> Bummer for the users, though. The game's not over yet. Maybe Meta sells, or is forced sell, WhatsApp. Or maybe people move on to the new thing.

neodymiumphish 4y ago

I think they did, just not in the way they expected. They've developed a messaging platform where finding the user you want to message is handled outside of something as arbitrary and transitory as a phone number. For example, military members (in the US) rely heavily on FB Messenger because deployments, short tours, and overseas assignments kill the reliability of using a regular phone number to maintain contact with friends and family. Messenger handles that by connecting via Facebook and maintaining that connection regardless of the users' phone numbers or email addresses.

hnlmorg 4y ago
Thats the norm, not the exception. Back in the early days that was the only way these services operates: AOL IM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, IRC, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, Skype, MySpaceIM etc. Even now you have Discord, Slack, Steam Chat… and that’s before you start taking federated services like (Matrix and XMPP) or other social networks (like Twitter, Reddit, etc) into account. This shift to using mobile numbers is a recent change. And not one I’m particularly fond of either.
aeyes 4y ago
When your phone number changes, WhatsApp asks if you want to change your number. You don't have to accept this, it will work fine on your old number. It is risky if you lose the SIM card but it works, I continued using an old number for three or four years after changing numbers and I was never forced to prove that I still was the owner of the old number.
- RF_Savage 4y ago
  And when your old phone number gets re-used by the telco, some random person will start getting your messages. A friend was quite freaked out when multiple afgans started messaging him on whatsapp on their "new" phone number. Apparently it formely belonged to a member of the local afgan diaspora. Thankfully they ware able to get a new number from the telco to deal with it.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  This works until the current owner of the previous number installs WhatsApp.

usrusr 4y ago

Bummer for the users? I'd say Zuckerberg is the clear loser in this story: what could be worse than failing to catch up with WhatsApp and discovering a new fundamental use case? Failing, then spending an obscene amount of money on buying WhatsApp, then seeing a considerable part of that money enabling the Signal Foundation and watching Signal eat up the user base of both WhatsApp and the Facebook Messenger. Users are fine.

badkitty99 4y ago
VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
> watching Signal eat up the user base of both WhatsApp and the Facebook Messenger Is this actually happening or just wishful thinking
- hbn 4y ago
  Telegram has made some impressive strides over the past few years (it's quite mainstream as a messaging platform and social platform in some countries) I don't think I'd say the same for Signal though.
  - wowokay 4y ago
    Idk, I feel like Telegram is viewed more like a subscription based twitter feed. It’s more about pushed updates to groups of people then communication between loved ones. (It’s also used a lot as a support medium, although I wouldn’t considered forced adoption for support or even notification as an indication of user adoption that’s like saying EV adoption is trending up while some areas almost force conversion).
- usrusr 4y ago
  Definitely happening in my little corner of humanity. Not happening as in usage of the Meta messengers has dropped to zero, but it's becoming more and more like "funny how this group is still on WhatsApp, do they live under a rock?" At least FB messenger has a tiny niche left as the way to communicate if you are connected on FB but haven't shared phone numbers.

marcosdumay 4y ago

It's telling that Watsup did never "catch up" on performance reliability, and pushability. They started top notch on those, and if anything, moved down a bit with time. That's because you simply can't catch up on those. It's not something that happens inside the constraints of software development. That's why Facebook didn't. "Catching up" is even a very weird way to say it. That wording implies Watsup was a huge entrenched company with a lot of resources spent on development, and Facebook was a nimble team that was working hard to add enough development effort to be an equal.

thomasahle 4y ago

> They never did catch up on table stakes What didn't they catch up on? To me Messenger seems like a better user experience than WhatsApp or any of the other three messaging clients I need to use. Indeed WhatsApp is lacking basic functionality like a desktop app. Also, a client tied to a phone number may work well for some people, but a pain whenever you change your number, and it makes discovery of people much harder.

jowsie 4y ago
WhatsApp has had a desktop app for years.
- dnissley 4y ago
  Does my phone need to be on/connected to the internet for it to work? That's always been the weird thing for me about Whatsapp, is that your phone seems to be the "server" for the app.
  - tomjohnneill 4y ago
    They fixed that fairly recently.
  - ascar 4y ago
    Since a few weeks/months ago, no. Before that yes.
    - WilTimSon 4y ago
      Except now it won't sync older messages and sometimes messages only get delivered to your phone but not the desktop. They took a decade to roll out a desktop app and even then it's a mess. WhatsApp has been degrading under Meta's ownership.
- thomasahle 4y ago
  The old website/app was very primitive. Only this year did multi device linking come out of beta.

root_axis 4y ago

Why was it a bummer for the users?

afavour 4y ago
Lack of competition. Don’t need to compete with WhatsApp once you own it.

menzoic 4y ago

They didn't need to since they bought WhatsApp

wutbrodo 4y ago

> They never did catch up on table stakes, In what sense? The table stakes of boring functionality seem to me to be much better implemented in messenger than whatsapp. Everything from a more intuitive UI to a web option is better done in messenger.

el_nahual 4y ago

And yet their purchase of WA shows Zuck's ruthlessness and business genius. He saw his team fail to beat WA, he realized they would never beat them, and he made a decision to buy WA for what was an insane price. 16 billion dollars for a 24(?) person company with no revenue. I think 99% of executives on earth wouldn't have made that decision. They would have believed their teams that said victory was around the corner, or deluded themselves into thinking success was inevitable, or would have been afraid to demoralize their team, or would have rationalized away why messaging wasn't important after all. He just acted and won, for what now seems like a bargain.

edmundsauto 4y ago
WhatsApp had revenue; part of their “what could have been” tragic narrative was they charged $1/yr, iirc.
- justapassenger 4y ago
  Most of users never paid it, and skeleton of the team they had was supported also by contractors, and most importantly, ignoring any abuse. That was ok in those days, but it wasn’t sustainable as they grew. Dealing with abuse, spam, misinformation is very costly, even when you’re e2ee.
  - 0des 4y ago
    what is misinformation?
    - danrocks 4y ago
      It’s when you disagree with me.
      - pocket_cheese 4y ago
        I don't trust big tech to regulate truth, but let's not dismiss misinformation with such broad strokes. There are deliberate attempts by politically and monetarily motivated groups to spread objectively false propaganda. FUD/HODL to mislead investors, conspiracy theories to sway public opinion, pseudoscience to peddle ineffective medical treatments... The people doing this effectively aren't individuals disagreeing with mainstream discourse, they know exactly what they're doing.

ksec 4y ago

>Just buy WhatsUp I mean you could just tell how unpopular WhatsApp is in the US. I still remember no one in the US have heard of Whatsapp when Facebook announce the 16B acquisition. But WhatsUp could certainly be another Startup idea.

copperx 4y ago
WhatsApp is like the metric system. Used almost universally, except in the US.
2143 4y ago
I went to college in the USA, and none of my classmates had any idea what WhatsApp is. Funnily enough, my US university's "international office" (the department that deals with international students including facilitating visas, travel signatures, SEVIS, resolving other confusions of international students etc) setup a WhatsApp group to communicate with all international students because that's the one app all of us had in common.

missedthecue 4y ago

As far as I can tell, there seems to be a great deal of competition in the messaging app space, in addition to Whatsapp and Messenger, you have Hangouts, Signal, Viber, Telegram, Wire, Skype, Slack, Discord, and of course good old SMS. And these are just off the top of my head. I would not be surprised if we see more consolidation in the sector.

gernb 4y ago

I know everyone else in the west seems to use WhatsApp but in my social circle I connect to nearly everyone via FB Messenger. I have but don't use WhatsApp. I have no idea what it provides that FB Messenger doesn't provide and better. I don't need a phone number for FB Messenger. I can access it trivially at messenger.com, no need for the crazy QR code non-sense of WhatsApp. I also do not have to give FB Messenger access to my contact list, unlike WhatsApp (maybe that's changed but it used to be required).

morelish 4y ago
WhatsApp doesn’t provide anything messenger doesn’t. As far as I can tell, WhatsApp as a product reached its ‘market fit’ years and years ago, in that they stopped bothering trying to add anything to it. Real pity in some ways its not even slightly extensible
- Matl 4y ago
  > WhatsApp doesn’t provide anything messenger doesn’t. People say Telegram provides everything Signal does too, but seem to forget about E2E by default.
AdvancedCarrot 4y ago
Main thing is vastly better privacy. Messenger doesn't use E2E encryption and has no options for disappearing chats. Facebook can and do read your messages at will.
- ffzdmfkdk 4y ago
  Messenger has E2EE and disappearing messages now as well.

nnoitra 4y ago

Why was WhatsApp so popular though, wasn't it just another chat app for mobile?