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These kinds of startups really aren't tech startups. They're media startups. It's not about their technology. When Facebook bought WhatsApp they were not buying
by api 12y ago
These kinds of startups really aren't tech startups. They're media startups. It's not about their technology. When Facebook bought WhatsApp they were not buying technology.
That being said-- trying to replicate such thing is not a bad programming exercise.
- jmhobbs 12y agoNot at all? WhatsApp has a phenomenal engineering team from what I have read.
- timtamboy63 12y agoThey do - but Facebook didn't buy Whatsapp for the technology. They bought them for the users. If the technology was absolutely horrible, but they still had the same users, etc, it still would have been $19B
- api 12y agoI didn't say it was bad, just that it wasn't the primary asset that was acquired. Facebook could easily have built a massively cross platform mobile chat app in-house. ... and it wasn't the best, either... look up their single hard-coded AES key for example.
- marco1 12y agoFully agree. Same is true for Poke/Snapchat. And WhatsApp was also using plain HTTP for a long time.
- marco1 12y agoI agree that the technology part is not the hardest and a large part of the success or failure is marketing and media issues. But lots of startups have a lot of CRUD and I wouldn't call every technology product that isn't really pioneering a simple media product.