It's overtly abysmal. By the numbers: - WhatsApp has a revenue of $20m/year - Does not do advertising, charges s buck a year per user second year onward - Facebook paid $42 per WhatsApp user A little more math: WhatsApp has 450 million users. It made $20m off them. It has no advertising at all. That means roughly one in 200 WhatsApp users have ever given the site any money (I know I haven't - didn't even know they charged!). With the current business model, Facebook needs 405 billion people to use WhatsApp before it turns a profit. Which is going to be a hard thing to do unless they've struck a deal with the Core Worlds of The Old Republic. Or they need to make WhatsApp a factor of 400 more profitable amongst current and future customers. These are people who don't use Skype because it's expensive. At a penny a minute. iMessage does suck bilgewater, and I'll tell you why. Apple uses a proprietary mishmash of iPV4, iPV6, Apache, Samba and VNC , the makeup of which changes on whim. They also took their home-grown SMB proprietary in 2011, thereby making it nearly impossible for 3rd parties to integrate with it. It's haxie as hell and a company with that much clout and marketshare should really know better. But they don't, and iCloud is a mess, and nobody wants to use iWork, and iChat is pure shit. They offered to buy Dropbox in 2010 for a billion dollars and Dropbox said "no thanks, you don't have your shit together and if you ate us you'd fuck us up, too." Kinda see why.