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comment by kleinbl00

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.





ecib  ·  3895 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah, I'm working on the assumption that Facebook is absolutely not going to stick with Whatsapp's business model. They probably chuckled and patted it on the head when they first encountered it. Could be wrong.

iCloud is terrible. It is so very clear why Jobs wanted Dropbox. It is the very epitome of "it just works". I love Apple products (that aren't services), but I am SO GLAD Dropbox refused to sell to them. So glad. I wish Box had more consumer application support and wasn't so enterprise-centric, I snagged 50GB of storage/yr free in perpetuity (it's actually a great strategy for them I'm just being selfish).

Apple should just build a new Box/Dropbox app from the ground up, platform agnostic, put it on all their home screens, and kill iCloud. It would make me want to buy their hardware more.