i would argue that being free is not even enough to be competitive long term. the problem is that because messaging is very cheap and easy to implement and is a

i would argue that being free is not even enough to be competitive long term. the problem is that because messaging is very cheap and easy to implement and is a service that almost everyone uses it is in the best interest of companies like FB to actually pay people to use their service (which is what they do with WA) in order to prevent competitors from building a user base that could be used to compete with their core monetized apps. apple and google are essentially doing the same thing, giving away their proprietary messaging apps for free, and giving them highly valuable real estate on their platforms in order to win/keep market share, and they have even more power than fb, because they can change the platform, introduce new protocols, etc, to give themselves a competitive advantage. microsoft was willing to spend billions to give skype away for free for the same reasons. free is not a guaranteed winner if you have three trillion dollar companies paying people to use their competitive products and they control the platforms that your app runs on.