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Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

Their biggest threats aren't AWS/Azure. AWS just hosts their stuff, the same way they host Netflix. This is no different than Samsung building smartphones, but selling memory chips to everyone else, even Apple.

Twilio's biggest worry is every incumbent IM provider trying to court businesses with replacing telephony.

Their future competitors are therefore Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp (hey, also Facebook!), and anyone else who wants to push their messaging/call platform to replace more and more of what people used to use business-to-consumer and consumer-to-business phone calls and texts.

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> AWS just hosts their stuff, the same way they host Netflix.

Uh, AWS already has a competing web services product, it's functionality is just severely lacking when you compare to Twilio: https://aws.amazon.com/sns/

> Their future competitors are therefore Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp (hey, also Facebook!)

Funny enough, Twilio's largest customer is actually WhatsApp. If Facebook wants to increase some margin and can do it more cost effectively than using Twilio as a provider (I don't see why not) then this is a huge threat to Twilio commercially speaking.

Good point on SNS, but AWS' approach is to offer a kitchen-sink menagerie of services. I stand by my accidental analogy that they're the Samsung of the web services world: have one product for every possible need, but only focus on a handful.

With regard to Facebook, I'm talking about initiatives like these [1] [2] [3] which leverage Facebook's ubiquity and better discoverability tools than PTSN to de-emphasize it for B2C and C2B communication.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/business/news/find-and-contact-busi...

[2] https://www.facebook.com/business/news/new-tools-for-managin...

[3] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform

If whatsapp gets into this business, I have to applaud their pokerface.

Matt Yglesias wrote that amazon is a "charitable institution being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers."

I feel that applies more to Whatsapp than amazon. When you install Whatsapp, you are still presented (with a package in the UI that links to a blog post from 2012(!) about how companies "know literally everything about you, your friends, your interests, and they use it all to sell ads."

https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads?

If they pivot to sell services after their lofty position, I would expect significant user anger.

WhatsApp doesn't have to get into this business because Facebook Messenger is already in this business.

If this were in the grocery store, WhatsApp is the organic, GMO-free product and Facebook Messenger is the mainstream product, but they're both made by Facebook -- a product for every need.

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